Pure apraxic agraphia with abnormal writing stroke sequences: report of a Japanese patient with a left superior parietal haemorrhage.
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A 67 year old Japanese male patient had pure agraphia after a haemorrhage in the left superior parietal lobule. He developed difficulty in letter formation but showed no linguistic errors, consistent with the criteria of apraxic agraphia. He manifested a selective disorder of sequencing writing strokes, although he was able to orally state the correct sequences. The patient's complete recovery after 1 month, without new learning, showed that he had manifested a selective disorder of writing stroke sequences. These findings indicate that the final stage of the execution of writing according to acquired sequential memory shown as a stroke sequence can be selectively disturbed, and should be considered to be distinct from the ability of character imagery and the knowledge of the writing stroke sequence itself. This case also indicates that the left superior parietal lobule plays an important part in the execution of writing. (+info)
Retraining of dysgraphia - a case study.
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A patient with dysgraphia resulting from a gunshot wound of the brain is presented. Analysis of the functional status of component operations involved in the skill of writing is described. A retraining scheme based on this analysis brought about a significant improvement in the patient's handwriting. (+info)
Evaluation and outcome of aphasia in patients with severe closed head trauma.
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In this study long-term observation of 12 patients with aphasia secondary to severe closed head trauma took place. The most frequent symptoms were amnestic aphasia and verbal paraphasia. Only one patient with a constant slow wave EEG focus in the dominant hemisphere had severe receptive symptoms. In all other patients the aphasia recovered rather well, though not totally, but the presence and degree of concomitant neuropsychological disorders were most important for the final outcome. (+info)
Effectiveness of neuromotor task training for children with developmental coordination disorder: a pilot study.
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The aim of this pilot study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a Neuromotor Task Training (NTT), recently developed for the treatment of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) by pediatric physical therapists in the Netherlands. NTT is a task-oriented treatment program based upon recent insights from motor control and motor learning research. Ten children with DCD (intervention group) were tested before and after 9 and 18 treatment sessions on the Movement ABC and a dysgraphia scale in order to measure the effectiveness of treatment on gross and fine motor skills in general and handwriting in particular. Five children (no-treatment control group) were tested twice with a time lag of nine weeks on the Movement ABC in order to measure spontaneous improvement. No improvement was measured for the children in the no-treatment control group, whereas a significant improvement was found for children in the intervention group for both quality of handwriting and performance on the Movement ABC after 18 treatment sessions. (+info)
Reading aloud in jargonaphasia: an unusual dissociation in speech output.
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A patient is described who showed several dissociations between oral and written language processing after bilateral retrorolandic vascular lesion. Dissociation was firstly between abolished auditory comprehension and preserved written comprehension and then involved confrontation naming, clearly superior in the written modality. The third striking dissociation involved oral output; spontaneous speech, although fluent and well articulated, consisted of neologistic jargon, while reading aloud was clearly superior though not perfect. Data are discussed with reference to a cognitive model of word processing. The pattern of dissociation in word production may be due to a failure in retrieving the phonological word form from the semantic system. (+info)
Parkinsonism following bilateral lesions of the globus pallidus: performance on a variety of motor tasks shows similarities with Parkinson's disease.
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OBJECTIVES: The authors report the results of detailed investigations into the motor function of a patient who, after a heavy drinking binge and subsequent unconsciousness, respiratory acidosis, and initial recovery, developed parkinsonism characterised by hypophonic speech and palilalia, "fast micrographia", impaired postural reflexes, and brady/akinesia in proximal (but not distal) alternating upper limb movements. METHODS: In addition to brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), different aspects of motor function were investigated using reaction time (RT) tasks, pegboard and finger tapping tasks, flex and squeeze tasks, movement related cortical potentials (MRCPs), and contingent negative variation (CNV). Cognitive function was also assessed. The results were compared to those previously reported in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD). RESULTS: Brain MRI showed isolated and bilateral globus pallidus (GP) lesions covering mainly the external parts (GPe). These lesions were most probably secondary to respiratory acidosis, as other investigations failed to reveal an alternative cause. The results of the RT tasks showed that the patient had difficulties in preparing and maintaining preparation for a forthcoming movement. MRCP and CNV studies were in line with this, as the early component of the MRCP and CNV were absent prior to movement. The patient's performance on pegboard and finger tapping, and flex and squeeze tasks was normal when performed with one hand, but clearly deteriorated when using both hands simultaneously or sequentially. CONCLUSIONS: In general, the present results were similar to those reported previously in patients with PD. This provides further indirect evidence that the output of globus pallidus is of major importance in abnormal motor function in PD. The possible similarities of the functional status of GP in PD and our case are discussed. (+info)
Around the clock surveillance: simple graphic disturbance in patients with hemispatial neglect carries implications for the clock drawing task.
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BACKGROUND: Drawing, and the clock drawing task in particular, is widely used as a diagnostic tool in the study of hemispatial neglect. It is generally assumed that the errors in graphic production, such as the misplacement of numbers, reflect a visuospatial deficit, and that drawing production itself (for example, producing the circle) is unimpaired. OBJECTIVES: To test this assumption by examining whether the production of simple circles is affected by neglect. METHODS: 16 right hemisphere stroke patients copied circles of various sizes and their drawings were measured for size accuracy. RESULTS: Patients with more severe neglect produced greater scaling errors, consistently drawing the circle smaller than the original. Errors were not in the horizontal axis alone--shrinkage occurred equally in both height and width axes. CONCLUSIONS: Neglect can co-occur with constructional difficulties that serve to exacerbate the symptoms presented. This should be taken into account in the assessment of even apparently simple drawing tasks. (+info)
Do deep dyslexia, dysphasia and dysgraphia share a common phonological impairment?
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This study directly compared four patients who, to varying degrees, showed the characteristics of deep dyslexia, dysphasia and/or dysgraphia--i.e., they made semantic errors in oral reading, repetition and/or spelling to dictation. The "primary systems" hypothesis proposes that these different conditions result from severe impairment to a common phonological system, rather than damage to task-specific mechanisms (i.e. grapheme-phoneme conversion). By this view, deep dyslexic/dysphasic patients should show overlapping deficits but previous studies have not directly compared them. All four patients in the current study showed poor phonological production across different tasks, including repetition, reading aloud and spoken picture naming, in line with the primary systems hypothesis. They also showed severe deficits in tasks that required the manipulation of phonology, such as phoneme addition and deletion. Some of the characteristics of the deep syndromes - namely lexicality and imageability effects - were typically observed in all of the tasks, regardless of whether semantic errors occurred or not, suggesting that the patients' phonological deficits impacted on repetition, reading aloud and spelling to dictation in similar ways. Differences between the syndromes were accounted for by variation in other primary systems--particularly auditory processing. Deep dysphasic symptoms occurred when the impact of phonological input on spoken output was disrupted or reduced, either as a result of auditory/phonological impairment, or for patients with good phonological input analysis, when repetition was delayed. 'Deep' disorders of reading aloud, repetition and spelling can therefore be explained in terms of damage to interacting primary systems such as phonology, semantics and vision, with phonology playing a critical role. (+info)