Semantic dementia: Brazilian study of nineteen cases

Abstract

The term semantic dementia was devised by Snowden et al. in 1989 and nowadays, the semantic dementia syndrome is recognized as one of the clinical forms of frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) and is characterized by a language semantic disturbance associated to non-verbal semantic memory impairment.ObjectivesThe aim of this study was to describe a Brazilian sample of 19 semantic dementia cases, emphasizing the clinical characteristics important for differential diagnosis of this syndrome.MethodsNineteen cases with semantic dementia were evaluated between 1999 and 2007. All patients were submitted to neurological evaluation, neuroimaging exams and cognitive, language and semantic memory evaluation.ResultsAll patients presented fluent spontaneous speech, preservation of syntactic and phonological aspects of the language, word-finding difficulty, semantic paraphasias, word comprehension impairment, low performance in visual confrontation naming tasks, impairment on tests of non-verbal semantic memory and preservation of autobiographical memory and visuospatial skills. Regarding radiological investigations, temporal lobe atrophy and/or hypoperfusion were found in all patients.ConclusionsThe cognitive, linguistic and of neuroimaging data in our case series corroborate other studies showing that semantic dementia constitutes a syndrome with well defined clinical characteristics associated to temporal lobe atrophy.

Rehabilitation in semantic dementia: Study of the effectiveness of lexical reacquisition in three patients

“…Some of these tasks had been described in a previous study. 25 , 26 As expected for the profile of SD clinical syndrome, all the cases presented low performance in visual confrontation naming (Boston Naming Test - BNT), difficulties on the word definition task and oral word comprehension (word-picture matching task), preserved syntactic comprehension, surface dysgraphia and impairment on tests of non-verbal associative knowledge. The diagnosis of SD was confirmed by experienced cognitive neurologists and was based on clinical history, neurological examination, neuropsychological and language evaluation, and neuroimaging data.…”

Acquired Dyslexia in Three Writing Systems: Study of a Portuguese-Japanese Bilingual Aphasic Patient

“…It is therefore possible to claim that in Portuguese (as in English and other alphabetic writing systems), surface dyslexia can be observed without damage to the semantic system. We note here that the opposite patterndamage to the semantic system without surface dyslexia in Portuguese -has also been reported [37,38] as in other languages (see also Wilson et al).…”

“…Although rare, studies of patients with acquired dyslexia in Portuguese tend to reflect the patterns of impaired lexical and nonlexical reading reported in other alphabetic scripts. Portuguese speaking patients with acquired phonological, deep, surface, semantic and literal dyslexia, are all reported [5,13,25,[37][38][39]41]. The characteristics of these types of acquired dyslexias closely resemble those described in English, French and Spanish readers.…”

Primary progressive aphasia: Classification of variants in 100 consecutive Brazilian cases

“…All patients were also submitted to language evaluation by the same speech pathologist (MLHS), which included application of the following tools: communication functional evaluation, aphasia battery tests (Beta MT-86, 16 Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Exam-BDAE, 17 Boston Naming Test, 18 Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) reading and writing protocols 19 and in some cases additional evaluation (example: tasks of semantic memory battery previously described in other papers). 20 - 21 …”

“… 22 Semantic comprehension was evaluated through word-picture matching and word definition tasks from the semantic memory battery. 20 - 21 The BDAE 17 stimulus were used to assess sentence repetition. Object knowledge (visual semantic memory) was assessed through qualitative analysis of responses on the Boston Naming Test 18 and in some cases the Peno protocol, 23 Pyramids and Palm Tree (PPT) 24 and famous face recognition tests were used.…”