alcc

• Adult Aphasia is an acquired impairment in language production, comprehension or cognitive processes that underlie language.
• Aphasia is characterized by a reduction or impairment in the ability to access language form or structure, language content or meaning, language use or function, and the cognitive processes that underlie and interact with language such as attention, memory and thinking.
• Aphasia is a multimodality disorder since it may affect listening, speaking, reading, writing and gesturing although not necessarily to the same degree.
• Causes of Aphasia include people of all ages who have suffered brain damage to the language-dominant hemisphere of the brain usually L hemisphere but at times can be at R hemisphere.
• Causes of Aphasia can be due to stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain tumors, brain surgery, brain infections, and other neurological diseases.
• Social Worker/Office of Senior Citizen’s Affairs
• Other physicians who may be involved due to co-morbid conditions
• Friends and Community
• Symptoms of Aphasia include difficulty finding words (anomia), speaking with effort or haltingly, speaking in single words (e.g., names of objects), speaking in short, fragmented phrases, omitting smaller words like "the," "of," and "was" (telegraphic speech), putting words in the wrong order, substituting sounds and/or words (e.g., bed is called "table" or dishwasher a "wishdasher"), and making up words (e.g., jargon).
• Symptoms of Aphasia also include difficulty understanding spoken utterances, providing unreliable answer to "yes/no" questions, failing to understanding complex grammar, requiring extra time to understand spoken messages, finding it very hard to follow fast speech, misinterpreting subtleties of language, and lacking awareness of errors.
• Symptoms of Aphasia also include difficulty comprehending written material, difficulty recognizing some words by sight, inability to sound out words, substituting associated words for a word, difficulty reading noncontent words, and writing run-on sentences that don't make sense.
• The cognitive decline associated with dementia affects an individual's ability to comprehend and produce linguistic information.
• Neurodegenerative Diseases that result in Dementia include Alzheimer's disease, Lewy body disease, vascular pathology, frontotemporal lobar degeneration, Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome secondary to chronic alcohol abuse, traumatic brain injury, chronic traumatic encephalopathy due to repeated trauma, chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis, and human immunodeficiency virus.
• Dementia can be differentiated from delirium, an acute state of confusion associated with temporary, but reversible, cognitive impairments.
• Dementia is a syndrome resulting from acquired brain disease and characterized by progressive deterioration in memory and other cognitive domains such as language, judgment, abstract thinking, and executive functioning.
• Behavioral problems that develop as a result of the neuropathology, such as paranoia, hallucinations, and repetitiousness, may interfere with communication.
• Symptoms of Dementia (Language) include less concise discourse, economy of utterances and stereotypy of speech, repetitious/perseverative language, word-finding difficulties, difficulty recalling names of family and friends, tangential language, circumlocution, grammatical errors, use of jargon and loss of meaningful speech, and difficulty following and maintaining conversation.
• Symptoms of Dementia include being easily distracted, having difficulty attending, decreased information-processing speed, episodic memory deficits, short-term/working memory deficits, difficulty acquiring and remembering new information, difficulty setting goals and planning, poor judgment and impaired reasoning and problem-solving abilities, difficulty multi-tasking and handling complex tasks, difficulty responding to feedback, self-monitoring, and correcting one's own errors, lack of inhibition, and lack of mental flexibility.
• Differential Table for Aphasia includes Language (Stroke), Music (Stroke), Memory (Traumatic Brain Injury), and Cognitive-Communication Disorder.
• Cognitive-Communication Disorder is a disorder that affects any aspect of communication that is affected by disruption of cognition (attention, memory, organization, problem solving/reasoning, orientation to time, place and people, and executive functions).
• Causes of Cognitive-Communication Disorder include right hemisphere brain damage, traumatic brain injury, genetic disorders, lack of oxygen to the brain (anoxia), brain tumor, Dementia, and others.
• Dementia is a type of Cognitive-Communication Disorder that affects the ability to remember, think, and make decisions.
• Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, accounting for approximately 70% of all cases.
• Vascular dementia accounts for 17% of all cases of dementia.
• Aphasia, Cognitive Communication Disorder, Cognitive and Communication Disorder from Dementing Conditions, Agnosia, Apraxia of speech, Dysarthria are different forms of speech disorders.
• Impaired ability to compose meaningful written language is a symptom in bilingual patients.
• In bilingual patients, errors in selecting and maintaining appropriate language during conversation are common.
• In studies comparing bilingual and monolingual individuals, bilinguals demonstrated onset of dementia symptoms approximately 4 to 5 years later than monolinguals.
• Models of cognitive reserve postulate that increased brain reserve capacity or more efficient cognitive processing allows some individuals to cope with brain insult better than others.
• Reading comprehension difficulties are a common symptom in bilingual patients.
• Bilingual patients may forget to eat meals, initiate eating less often, take in less food and drink than they normally would during meals, due to distractions in the environment, compromising their nutrition.
• The risk of acquiring Alzheimer's is higher if an individual has a first-order relative with the disease.
• Lifelong bilingualism has been proposed as a factor contributing to cognitive reserve.
• Inappropriate behavior outside of socially acceptable range, inability to read facial expressions and other social cues, loss of empathy, mood fluctuations, including agitation and crying, restlessness, depression, negative reaction to questioning, combativeness/hostility/aggressiveness, compulsive or obsessive behaviors, erratic or strange behaviors, loss of initiative/motivation, paranoia and delusions of persecution are symptoms in bilingual patients.
• The remaining cases of dementia are accounted for by dementia with Lewy bodies, Parkinson's disease, frontotemporal lobar dementia, and mixed dementia types.
• Most dementias are the result of neuropathology resulting from diffuse degeneration in cortical and/or subcortical structures and neural pathways, and/or chemical changes that affect neural functioning.
• Regression to primary language in bilingual patients is a common phenomenon.
• Bilingual patients may experience language comprehension deficits.
• Difficulty following multi-step commands is a common symptom in bilingual patients.
• The concept of cognitive reserve was introduced to account for the observation that there does not appear to be a direct relationship between the severity of brain damage or pathology and the degree of disruption in performance.