Lost for Words: A Case of Primary Progressive Aphasia?

In 1892, Arnold Pick reported a 71-year-old man with a profound progressive aphasia evolving into a more generalised loss of mental abilities, who at postmortem showed pronounced shrinkage of the left temporal lobe. This chapter describes a patient (GC) who presented with a difficulty “remembering” the names of people, local places, and objects. K. Graham, K. Patterson, and J. R. Hodges attributed a patient (FM) “progressive pure anomia” to a reduction in communication between semantic and phonological representations. FM was a 55-year old woman with a 12-month history of difficulty with word production, especially for people’s names and everyday objects. In FM, the most revealing observations had come from the longitudinal assessment of her performance on naming and comprehension tasks. In other patients with semantic dementia, the most consistently involved region has been the left infero-lateral temporal neocortex; some patients have bilateral pathology while others exhibit only left-sided cortical atrophy.