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- CLINICA NEUROL, 43: 84－92, 2003
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Original Article
Writing Disorders in Primary Progressive Aphasia
Chiyoko Nagai, M.D. and Makoto Iwata, M.D.
Department of Neurology, Neurological Institute, Tokyo Women's Medical University
We investigated longitudinally three patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA) who exhibited fluent aphasia at the early stage, in terms of writing disorders. The writing disorders were the most striking during the aphasia quotient (AQ) was 50∼60 for all these patients. The characteristic features were as follows: (i) several types of perseverative errors, especially on spontaneous writing rather than on dictation (ii) confusion between letters and pictures (iii) preserved copying ability and (iv) total loss of writing ability at the final stage. Additionally, through the progression, linguistic level of the perseverative errors changed from sentence to word and finally to phoneme. The results suggest that the fluent type PPA patients have difficulty to recall proper letters and to arrange them in correct order following the writing plan, in addition to disinhibition and lexical stereotyping which were commonly observed in perseverative patients. The results also suggest that their writing disorders seem to be based on difficulty of letter manipulation as symbols.
(CLINICA NEUROL, 43: 84－92, 2003)
key words: primary progressive aphasia, writing, agraphia, perseveration
(Received: 29-Jun-02)
