1/24. Progressive agraphia, acalculia, and anomia: a single case report.A case of a 50-year-old, right-handed female, mono-lingual native Spanish-speaker with a university-level education and cognitive changes is reported. Over approximately 2 years, she presented with a progressive deterioration of writing abilities associated with acalculia and anomia. An MRI disclosed a left parietal temporal atrophy. Two years later, further significant cognitive decline consistent with a dementia of the Alzheimer's type was observed. amnesia, executive dysfunction, and ideomotor apraxia were found. writing was severely impaired, and some difficulties in reading were observed. Copying abilities, however, were relatively well preserved, and the patient could drive and go to different city locations without significant spatial orientation difficulties. A second MRI approximately 2 years later showed that brain atrophy had progressed significantly. Spontaneous writing and writing to dictation were impossible. The ability to read words was preserved, but the ability to read pseudowords was lost. Changes in calligraphy were noted. This case clearly illustrates the progression of focal cognitive defects over time and the spread of abnormalities to other domains.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/24. Discrepant oral and written spelling after left hemisphere tumour.Repetition, reading, confrontation naming, and oral and written spelling were studied in a 57 year-old man with a left hemisphere tumour. These tasks were repeated over a period of two weeks when the patient was being treated for brain oedema prior and subsequent to neurosurgical intervention. In the context of intact repetition and good reading, the most striking finding was a significant qualitative and quantitative discrepancy between oral and written spelling, with the latter task more severely affected. The pattern on oral spelling was that of lexical (or surface) agraphia. On written output, however, orthographic errors predominated. The relatively greater impairment of written spelling was not secondary to a motoric or visuo-spatial deficit. The observed patterns are not easily accommodated by current models of writing.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.25keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/24. The impact of deep dysgraphia on graphemic buffer disorders.This article describes an investigation into the residual writing skills of a severely dysgraphic patient (DA). We found that they were powerfully influenced by a number of lexical variables (lexicality, frequency, imageability, length and geminates). His error pattern was characterized by semantic, lexical, substitution, deletion errors and fragment responses that preserved the first letter. Thus, DA's written spelling was characterized by both deep dysgraphic and graphemic output buffer effects. It is proposed that this pattern of performance represents a new"putative functional syndrome."- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.17941616341122keywords = dysgraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/24. marchiafava-bignami disease, syndrome of interhemispheric disconnection, and right-handed agraphia in a left-hander.We present an original case of marchiafava-bignami disease in a 47-year-old left-handed alcoholic man. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated the typical lesion, a necrosis of the middle portion of the corpus callosum. diagnosis may thus be established in the living. In our case, the course was not fatal, which, to our knowledge, has only been described in four other cases in the literature. Clinically, our patient demonstrated an interhemispheric disconnection syndrome. The striking feature is that some of the symptoms were on the side opposite of the one that has previously been described in the literature, eg, right-handed agraphia, while others were on the usual side, eg, left-handed anomia. We discuss cerebral dominance for speech and handedness in left-handers and come to the conclusion that our patient's clinical features can only be explained by right hemispheric dominance for handedness and bilateral hemispheric representation of speech.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1.25keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/24. Lexical morphology and its role in the writing process: evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia.A case of acquired dysgraphia is presented in which the deficit is attributed to an impairment at the level of the Graphemic Output Buffer. It is argued that this patient's performance can be used to identify the representational character of the processing units that are stored in the Orthographic Output Lexicon. In particular, it is argued that the distribution of spelling errors and the types of lexical items which affect error rates indicate that the lexical representations passed from the lexical output system to the Graphemic Output Buffer correspond to the productive morphemes of the language.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.22427020426402keywords = dysgraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/24. The graphemic buffer and attentional mechanisms.Two patients with acquired dysgraphia were reported. The patients' performance in various written and oral spelling tasks converge in support of the hypothesis that they have selective damage, within the spelling system, to the Graphemic Buffer. Although the patients present with comparable patterns of error types, they differ in the distribution of errors as a function of letter position in words. The patients' patterns of errors are compared to previously reported patterns of spelling errors in dysgraphic patients and are discussed in terms of hypothesized mechanisms that operate on the representations that are stored in the Graphemic Buffer.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.044854040852804keywords = dysgraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
7/24. Disconnection syndrome in a right-handed patient with right hemispheric speech dominance.The callosal disconnection syndrome is characterized by unilateral (left) tactile anomia, unilateral (left) agraphia and unilateral (left) ideomotor apraxia. We report on a right-handed patient, who developed a callosal disconnection syndrome due to the rupture of an anterior communicant aneurysm. As he had right hemisphere dominance for language and praxis, the signs described above were crossed. He also featured a left alien hand sign and motor aprosody. The authors believe this is the first case of callosal disconnection in a right-hander with crossed language and praxis functions.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.25keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
8/24. Alexia without agraphia and associated disorders: importance of recognition in the rehabilitation setting.Alexia without agraphia is readily recognized in its pure (without other neurologic findings) but rare form. However, this deficit is more common when associated with other behavioral disturbances that result from trauma or cerebral infarction to the posterior cerebral hemispheres. Two cases presented with alexia without agraphia following infarction within the posterior cerebral artery territory. Because of initial confusion and disorientation the patients were diagnosed as demented and unsuitable for rehabilitation. Both subjects had a visual field deficit and color agnosia. prosopagnosia, simultanagnosia, and ataxia of visual-motor control were also present. The second case was unusual because of pure word blindness associated with a right occipital lobe lesion. Only a few such cases have been reported in the literature worldwide. This paper demonstrates that careful delineation of cognitive deficits permits greater understanding of functional disorders with improved rehabilitation outcome.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1.5keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
9/24. A case of literal alexia: evidence for a disconnection syndrome.We describe a patient with literal alexia, agraphia, and only minimal aphasia, resulting from a left occipito-parietal ischemic infarction. Neither impaired visual processing nor impaired oral output could explain the patient's letter reading deficit, since he retained the ability to match letters of mixed case, and remained able to spell aloud and to pronounce and comprehend orally spelled words. His residual word reading was characterized by better performance for nouns and highly imageable words than for functors , poorly imageable words, and nonwords. We propose that this patient's letter reading deficit was due to a partial disconnection of his visual from his linguistic systems, with residual word reading accomplished by a semantically mediated compensatory mechanism. We suggest, further, that the dissociations between word and letter reading observed in some alexic individuals may be attributed, in part, to a difference in the relative contributions of dorsal and ventral occipital structures to the reading process.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.25keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
10/24. Lexical agraphia. Further support for the two-system hypothesis of linguistic agraphia.Eight patients with acquired agraphia were studied using the same writing tests and were compared with normal and brain-damaged controls. Four patients fulfilled the criteria for lexical agraphia and on CT scan had lesions of the posterior angular gyrus that spared the supramarginal gyrus. The other 4 fulfilled the criteria for phonological agraphia. They had lesions on CT scan that were similar to those found in previously described patients with phonological agraphia. Their lesions involved the supramarginal gyrus or insula deep to it and spared the angular gyrus. These studies support the hypothesis that there are two dissociable spelling systems and that these spelling systems are disrupted by focal lesions in separate but distinct brain regions. Further studies investigated the relationships between phonological agraphia and phonological dyslexia (alexia), and lexical agraphia and surface dyslexia (lexical alexia). The data support the hypothesis that individual systems subserve the four processes of phonological spelling, phonological reading, lexical spelling and lexical reading.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 3.5keywords = agraphia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
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