Primary Progressive Aphasia in Brain's Language Functions Found Cause of Five Diseases

New neurological research says that five various diseases could attack the brain region responsible for the development and processing of language. These conditions specifically target the areas of the left hemisphere of the brain, a location where each of the major language-related cognitions.

Primary Progressive Aphasia

The brain study was carried out by scholars from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. According to their findings, the five diseases that attack the brain's left hemisphere could inflict a type of progressive impairment, also called primary progressive aphasia or PPA, on language skills.

Northwestern Medicine's Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease director Marsel Mesulam, who also led the study, explained that their team found that each disease can relay damage to various areas of the brain's language network.

The diseases have a broad scope of impacts on many language functions such as word comprehension and grammar. Each of the disorders can progress at its distinct rates and has various effects on a specific brain region, Mesulam continued.

The latest study is considered the most comprehensive investigation of language cognition-related diseases. According to a report by EurekAlert, Mesulam's team based their findings on 118 cases of PPA autopsy collections.

Brain's Language Functions and PPA

Each of the patients examined for the study had been monitored for over 25 years, making the new paper the most extensive research on the diseases that initiate problems to the brain's language functions.

The researchers analyzed each of the participants' brain health, the type of language impairment, the association of the particular diseases to the impairment, and the life expectancy of the patients, Mesulam said.

The participants, who all had PPA cases, were prospectively enrolled in this long-term study to understand more about the brain's language function and its structures.

Imaging of the organ and language testing was also conducted with the patients and the study. In addition, most of the participants gave consent to donate their brains upon death.

According to a report by News Medical, Mesulam said that one out of 100,000 individuals most likely has PPA.

PPA has basic symptoms that are subtle and somewhat similar to throat problems and anxiety. The condition is so unique that even specialists do not detect it as early as needed from the patients.

Neuroscience News reported that 40 percent of PPA cases are considered the most uncommon form of Alzheimer's disease. The case falls on a different type of particular disease primarily due to the impairment of language rather than memory.

Sixty percent of the cases have diseases causing PPA that was part of an entirely separate group of conditions known as frontotemporal lobar degeneration or FTLD. This type of degeneration is related to the development of 50 percent of dementia emerging past 65 years of age.

The study was published in the journal Brain, titled "Neuropathological fingerprints of survival, atrophy and language in primary progressive aphasia."

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