Logopenic Progressive Aphasia

Logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA) is a form of primary progressive aphasia characterized by slow speech and impaired syntactic comprehension and naming. It is similar to receptive aphasia and is associated with atrophy to the left posterior temporal cortex and inferior parietal lobule. It is suspected that an atypical form of Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of logopenic progressive aphasia.

Although patients with this the logopenic variant of PPA are still able to produce speech, their speech rate may be significantly slowed down due to word retrieval difficulty. Over time, they may experience the inability to retain lengthy information, causing problems with understanding complex verbal information. Some additional behavioral features include irritability, anxiety and agitation.

A distinguishing symptom is a repetition of spared and impaired language processes seen in logopenic patients in comparison to patients suffering from other forms of progressive aphasia. Difficulty in naming and repeating in motor speech, semantic, and syntactic abilities is one such specific challenge faced by patients of this disorder.

Compared to those people with primary progressive aphasia, patients with the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia have been found to be associated with cognitive and behavioral characteristics. Studies have shown that patients with the logopenic variant perform significantly worse on tests of calculation than other primary progressive aphasia patients. Several logopenic variant patients, especially those with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, have also been found to perform poorly on memory tasks.

Logopenic progressive aphasia is caused by the damage from segregate brain regions, inferior parietal lobe and superior temporal regions. The difficulties in naming was produced from the thinning of the inferior parietal lobe. Damage to the dorsal pathways creates language deificency in patients that is characteristic of logopenic progressive aphasia.