Review of Literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia

Description

Page: 984-986

Samita Sharma and Shikha Chawla (Department of Psychology, Amity School of Social Sciences, Mohali, Punjab)

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a kind of dementia that is characterised by a slow and isolated loss of linguistic ability. The condition typically begins with problems in finding words (anomia) and proceeds to the impairment of grammatical structure (syntax) and language comprehension (semantics). Speech production in PPA might be fluent or non-fluent. The symptoms of PPA are common with other kinds of Aphasia, Dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, leading to the misdiagnosis of many patients. PPA differs from frontal lobe dementia and other kinds of Alzheimer’s disease in some key aspects; in PPA, the patient’s memory, visual processing, and personality are preserved until the terminal stage, following which, all these faculties are severely hampered along with speech production and comprehension. In this review, the precise symptoms and criteria of PPA are discussed to highlight how it is distinguished from other language disorders, and the neurophysiological changes that the brain undergoes during the duration of PPA.