NAMING IMPROVEMENT IN PRIMARY PROGRESSIVE APHASIA FOLLOWING LEXICAL TRAINING

Abstract

the effect of rehabilitation of naming difficulties in patients with Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is difficult to test due to the heterogeneity and progressive nature of the disease. We set up a novel 12-week rehabilitation programme based on lexical cueing and tested its efficacy on a sample of patients recently diagnosed with PPA. twelve patients with a recent diagnosis of PPA were recruited from the Cognitive Neurology Clinic (NOCSAE hospital, Modena) and enrolled on a 12-weeks rehabilitation programme aimed to enhance lexical retrieval. The programme consisted in the visual presentation of 60 visual stimuli in a first 6-week phase, and another 60 stimuli in a consecutive 6-week phase. One third of the stimuli were taken from the Laiacona test and were changed in the two phases. During the training patients were asked to name each stimulus presented in three different forms: (i) image only (no text), (ii) image with a written orthographical cue, and (iii) image with the written complete stimulus name. Stimuli were presented in pseudorandomised order across participants. Performances on neuropsychological tests and naming were assessed at baseline, after the first 6-week phase and at the end of the programme. We tested whether overall naming of the Laiacona stimuli improved on the final assessment relative to baseline and studied if the improvement would be specifically driven by the treated subset of the Laiacona stimuli. there was an almost significant improvement on Laiacona overall naming (paired-t11=-2.17, p=0.052, baseline mean correct=60.0%; final mean correct=65.9%) on the final relative to the baseline assessment, which was driven by a significant improvement of treated Laiacona stimuli (paired-t11=-3.07, p=0.011, baseline mean correct=68.3%; final mean correct=76.0%). There were no significant differences between naming gain on stimuli during the first phase relative the second phase. although limited by the lack of a control group, our result suggest that the novel 12-weeks programme has a real potential for rehabilitation of naming difficulties in patients with PPA.