Language comprehension profiles in Alzheimer's disease, multi-infarct dementia, and frontotemporal degeneration

Grossman, Murray; D’Esposito, Mark; Hughes, Elizabeth M.; Onishi, Kristine H.; Biassou, Nadia; White-Devine, Tammy; Robinson, Keith

doi:10.1212/wnl.47.1.183

Cited by 102 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Consistent with previous findings, accuracy was lower for comprehension of nonbasic (type 2 and 3) than basic sentences in our group of patients (Grossman et al, 1996;Gorno-Tempini et al, 2004;Grossman and Moore, 2005) However, there was no significant difference in accuracy between types 2 and 3, showing that the anatomical differences we observed cannot simply be explained by differences in "general difficulty." Although sentences with embedded relative clauses are consistently considered "complex" structures, the classification of passive structures is less clear.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Anatomical Correlates of Sentence Comprehension and Verbal Working Memory in Neurodegenerative Disease

Amici¹,

Brambati²,

Wilkins³

et al. 2007

Journal of Neuroscience

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This study investigates whether sentence comprehension and nonsyntactic verbal working memory (vWM) are sustained by the same or by different neural systems. Scores in a sentence-picture matching task and in digits backward (DB) were correlated with magnetic resonance imaging voxelwise gray matter volumes using voxel-based morphometry in 58 patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Results showed that overall sentence comprehension scores, regardless of grammatical structure, correlated with gray matter volumes in the left temporoparietal region, whereas DB scores correlated with dorsolateral prefrontal and inferior parietal volumes. Comprehension of multiclausal relative sentences (type 3) significantly correlated with voxels in the dorsal portion of the left inferior and middle frontal gyri. When DB and multiclausal relative sentences were directly compared, they showed overlapping neural substrates in the dorsolateral left frontal region, supporting a single source of vWM for syntactic and nonsyntactic tasks. Within this large area of common involvement, a small portion of pars triangularis showed an independent effect of multiclausal sentences, whereas a region in the middle frontal gyrus showed greater correlation with DB. This study reconciles two opposing views, which hold that sentence comprehension and vWM rely on either the same or different anatomical resources.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Anatomical Correlates of Sentence Comprehension and Verbal Working Memory in Neurodegenerative Disease

Amici¹,

Brambati²,

Wilkins³

et al. 2007

Journal of Neuroscience

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“…AD is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that selectively involves specific brain regions early in the course of the disease, including the hippocampus, posterolateral temporal-parietal cortex, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This distribution of disease results in difficulty in retrieving information from familiar categories ("semantic memory") in 30% to 50% of AD patients (Grossman et al, 1996). Several imaging studies with AD patients have shown correlations between difficulty in semantic-mmory retrieval and functional cortical defects in dorsolateral prefrontal and posterolateral temporal-parietal cortices (Grossman et al, 1997;Desgranges et al, 1998).…”

Section: Using Novel Categories: Patient Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Multiple systems of category learning

Smith

Grossman

2008

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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We review neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence for the existence of three qualitatively different categorization systems. These categorization systems are themselves based on three distinct memory systems: working memory (WM), explicit long-term memory (explicit LTM), and implicit long-term memory (implicit LTM). We first contrast categorization based on WM with that based on explicit LTM, where the former typically involves applying rules to a test item and the latter involves determining the similarity between stored exemplars or prototypes and a test item. Neuroimaging studies show differences between brain activity in normal participants as a function of whether they are instructed to categorize novel test items by rule or by similarity to known category members. Rule instructions typically lead to more activation in frontal or parietal areas, associated with WM and selective attention, whereas similarity instructions may activate parietal areas associated with the integration of perceptual features. Studies with neurological patients in the same paradigms provide converging evidence, e.g., patients with Alzheimer's disease, who have damage in prefrontal regions, are more impaired with rule than similarity instructions. Our second contrast is between categorization based on explicit LTM with that based on implicit LTM. Neuropsychological studies with patients with medial-temporal lobe show that patients are impaired on tasks requiring explicit LTM, but perform relatively normally on an implicit categorization task. Neuroimaging studies provide converging evidence: Whereas explicit categorization is mediated by activation in numerous frontal and parietal areas, implicit categorization is mediated by a deactivation in posterior cortex.

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“…Semantic knowledge was assessed by asking patients to judge the semantic category membership of 48 individually presented stimuli in response to a simple probe ("Is it an X?"). 25,26 One target category was tools and the other target category was vegetables. Stimuli were presented in a manner blocked by category and material.…”

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confidence: 99%

Neurocognitive contributions to verbal fluency deficits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration

Libon

McMillan²,

Gunawardena³

et al. 2009

Neurology

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106

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Objective: To test the hypothesis that different neurocognitive networks underlie verbal fluency deficits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD).Methods: Letter ("FAS") and semantic ("animal") fluency tests were administered to patients with a behavioral/dysexecutive disorder (bvFTLD; n ϭ 71), semantic dementia (SemD; n ϭ 21), and progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n ϭ 26). Tests measuring working memory, naming/lexical retrieval, and semantic knowledge were also obtained. MRI voxel-based morphometry (VBM) studies were obtained on a subset of these patients (bvFTLD, n ϭ 51; PNFA, n ϭ 11; SemD, n ϭ 10). Results:Patients with SemD were disproportionately impaired on the semantic fluency measure.Reduced output on this test was correlated with impaired performance on naming/lexical retrieval tests. VBM analyses related reduced letter and semantic fluency to anterior and inferior left temporal lobe atrophy. Patients with bvFTLD were equally impaired on both fluency tests. Poor performance on both fluency tests was correlated with low scores on working memory and naming/ lexical retrieval measures. In this group, MRI-VBM analyses related letter fluency to bilateral frontal atrophy and semantic fluency to left frontal/temporal atrophy. Patients with PNFA were also equally impaired on fluency tests. Reduced semantic fluency output was correlated with reduced performance on naming/lexical retrieval tests. MRI-VBM analyses related semantic fluency to the right frontal lobe and letter fluency to left temporal atrophy. Frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD) is a progressive neurodegenerative illness associated with frontal and temporal lobe atrophy. Conclusions:1 Clinical subgroups of patients with FTLD include a decline in behavior, comportment, and executive functioning (bvFTLD) 2,3 ; semantic dementia (SemD) 4 associated with fluent progressive aphasia, impaired word comprehension, and poor object knowledge; and progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) 5 associated with effortful speech and impaired grammatic comprehension. Imaging studies have shown that these patients have different distributions of cortical atrophy. 6Recent research has demonstrated that these FTLD subgroups can present with impaired executive control as seen by reduced performance on tests of letter ("FAS") and semantic ("animals" 7,8 ) fluency. Because autopsy-confirmed patients with FTLD produce differing patterns of impairment on letter as compared with semantic fluency tests, these tests may help differentiate between Alzheimer disease (AD) and FTLD and between FTLD subtypes. [9][10][11][12] Functional neuroimaging studies of healthy adults associate these tasks with partially distinct activation patterns.

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Language comprehension profiles in Alzheimer's disease, multi-infarct dementia, and frontotemporal degeneration

Cited by 102 publications

References 20 publications

Anatomical Correlates of Sentence Comprehension and Verbal Working Memory in Neurodegenerative Disease

Anatomical Correlates of Sentence Comprehension and Verbal Working Memory in Neurodegenerative Disease

Multiple systems of category learning

Neurocognitive contributions to verbal fluency deficits in frontotemporal lobar degeneration

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