Clinical Study And Significance Of Language Repetition Ability In Logopenic Progressive Aphasia

Object: To study language repetition ability testing in the early diagnosis and recognition of LPA,explore the repetition indicators sensitive to LPA,and infer the potential cognitive defects based on the pattern of repetition ability impairment.Methods: 5 patients diagnosed as Logopenic Progressive Aphasia(LPA),4 patients diagnosed as Semantic dementia(SD),and 7 patients diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease(AD)with MMSE≥20,and 7 healthy elderly people with MMSE≥27,were tested by repetition ability testing made in our study which include words,non-words,phrases/sentences,span tasks,etc.Craniocerebral MRI was performed in all patients.Results: 1.Compared with healthy elderly,three diagnostic groups had more serious repeated deficit.2.Compared with SD group,patients in LPA group had worse repeated performance in the subitems of verbs,non-word,digit span and word span of different phonological;Compared with AD group,patients in LPA had worse performance in the subitems of verbs,non-word,low-frequency sentences,digit span and word span of different phonological.3.In LPA group: the repetition of verb is more difficult than that of nouns;The repeated accuracy of non-word decreases with syllable length increasing;The repetition of LNM is more difficult than others,and decreasing of phonological similarity effect was founded.4.There was no significant difference in subitem scores of MMSE among three diagnostic groups.5.The MRI of early LPA lacked characteristic.Conclusion: LPA,SD and AD patients all had defects in language repetition.Verbs,nonword,digit span and word span of different phonological tasks were more sensitive indicators to distinguish LPA from SD and AD.The unique pattern of repeated impairment in LPA patients supports the hypothesis that impaired phonological short-term store is the core cognitive deficit of LPA.The self-developed language repetition ability testing can comprehensively and thoroughly detect various types of repeated deficit.Compared with MMSE and MRI commonly used in clinical,our testing has certain advantages in the early diagnosis and recognition of LPA.