What Is Agraphia?

Aphasia refers to a clinical syndrome in which abstract signal thinking is impaired due to damage to the nerve center, and the ability to express and understand spoken and written words is lost. Aphasia does not include language symptoms caused by impaired consciousness and general mental decline, nor does it include speech, reading, and writing impairments caused by hearing, vision, writing, pronunciation and other sensory and motor organ damage. Defects in language function caused by congenital or juvenile diseases do not fall into the category of aphasia.

Basic Information

Visiting department

Neurology

Common locations

Central nervous system

Common causes

Caused by Alzheimer's disease, brain abscess, brain tumor, hepatic encephalopathy, stroke, etc.

Common symptoms

Spoken, written and inability to understand

Causes of Aphasia

There is a language center in the human cerebral cortex, which is the physiological basis of human language ability. Its role is to control human language behavior. Once this center is damaged due to brain trauma or due to cerebrovascular blood supply disturbance, people's language behavior will be impaired. This is aphasia. Patients with aphasia cannot express their meaning accurately, and are severely unable to speak. The main causes of aphasia are:

1.Alzheimer's disease can cause progressive, irreversible conceptual motor aphasia.

2. Aphasia can be caused by a brain abscess, which often reverses itself after the inflammation subsides.

3. Progressive aphasia in brain tumors often occurs later than decreased mental sensitivity, headache, dizziness, and seizures, which can occur simultaneously with or later than increased intracranial pressure.

4. Hepatic encephalopathy can cause progressive structural aphasia, which can be improved after treatment.

5. Stroke can induce sudden and persistent aphasia, and the accompanying performance varies depending on the affected artery.

Aphasia clinical manifestations

Motor aphasia

Motor aphasia is also called expressive aphasia, oral aphasia, cortical motor aphasia, and so on. It is caused by the Broca's area, which is caused when the speech motor center in the third part of the frontal gyrus is damaged. The symptoms are characterized by the patient's ability to understand other people's language, and the movement of the articulating organs is not impaired.

2. sensory aphasia

Also known as sensory aphasia Wenicke aphasia. The lesion is located in the Wenicken's area and the auditory communication area. After the connection with the speech center is interrupted, it hinders the activation of the auditory word "image". The characteristic is that the patient's hearing is normal, but he cannot understand the meaning of others' comments. Although he has the ability to speak, the vocabulary and grammatical errors are disordered.

3. Dyslexia

The lesion is mainly located in the angular gyrus, which is characterized by the patient's absence of visual impairment. When he sees the text symbols that he originally recognized, he cannot read the phonetic sounds and the meaning, which is often accompanied by miswriting, miscalculation, body image disorder, and spatial misrecognition. Simple dyslexia is normal in other languages. It can automatically speak, retell spoken words, and understand spoken words, but cannot understand words, so it has no ability to read aloud, and cannot copy. Simple aphasia is normal in intelligence and calculation.

4. Other types

Also includes conductive aphasia, named aphasia, aphasia, and so on.

Aphasia check

Aphasia detection methods are:

1. Halstead-Wepman Aphasia Screening Test

It is a rapid screening test to determine whether there is aphasia. The design of the project, in addition to the evaluation of the functional links in the process of speech understanding and expression (such as: call names, fingering, spelling, writing), also includes the examination of incompetence, stuttering speech disorder, can be used for Subjects with intellectual level, various educational levels and economic status. However, because the method is not standardized, the interpretation of the results needs to have sufficient experience.

2. Minnesota Aphasia Test

The Minnesotaaphasiaexamination is an aphasia test consisting of a set of 47 sub-tests that measure the dysfunction of listening, speaking, reading, and writing of spoken and written speech disorders and number-relational arithmetic. Its interpretation is based on Schuell's classification based on the nature and severity of the disorder. Although the application is more common, it is inconsistent with the classification of aphasia based on neuroanatomy, which is familiar and understood by clinical neurologists. It is possible to limit the use of the test.

3.Spreen-Benton Aphasia Test

A more comprehensive comprehensive aphasia test. Its sub-tests are aimed at the following speech functions: visual name, tactile name, digital paraphrase, fluency of words, sentence paraphrase, name recognition, description of object use, and token test ), Reading quizzes, writing and speaking quizzes. Adult norms have been developed for comparison.

4. Marking Quiz

The token test is a screening test for aphasia.

Test method: Give the subjects a series of increasingly difficult instructions, and ask them to play with some plastic blocks of different geometries according to the instructions. Below the white triangle. "The analysis of the results shows that it can effectively distinguish aphasia from non-aphasia. Its reliability rate is 90%.

Aphasia diagnosis

Can be diagnosed based on clinical symptoms and test results.

Aphasia treatment

Drug treatment

An Fei An Ming can increase patient alertness; bromocriptine can improve speech output; improve learning and memory functions, such as brain rehabilitation.

2. Primary disease treatment

Actively treat primary disease, such as Alzheimer's disease, brain abscess, brain tumor, hepatic encephalopathy, etc.

3. Other treatments

With speech training and psychotherapy, the methods are flexible and diverse. When treatment progresses, patients should be encouraged in time to strengthen their confidence. When the patient is full, the difficulty can be appropriately increased. For family guidance and language environment adjustment, it is necessary to give the patient's family members the necessary guidance often to make it better with the treatment.

Aphasia prognosis

The prognosis of aphasia is consistent with the prognosis of the primary disease. As the pace of aging in China accelerates, aphasia tends to become severe and complicated. Coupled with the decline in brain function caused by aging, symptoms may sometimes worsen. Aphasia may also worsen if the stroke is recurrent or based on progressive disease.

Aphasia prevention

Early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment of this disease are the key to prevention and treatment. In daily life, we should pay attention to safety, especially to protect the brain from trauma to prevent damage to the corresponding parts of the brain, resulting in aphasia; at the same time, we should also pay attention to the development of normal diet, psychology and living habits to avoid cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases.