SHORT-TERM REHABILITATION FOR LINGUISTIC IMPAIRMENTS IN PRIMARY PROGRESSIVE APHASIA: A CASE SERIES

Abstract

Language rehabilitation has been a valid strategy in order to slow the progression of symptoms and to increase quality of life for patients with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The objective is to report the results of intensive short-term treatment administered to a case series of patients with non-fluent PPA (PPA-NF), semantic PPA (PPA-S), logopenic PPA (PPA-L) and unclassified PPA (PPA- NC), focusing on sentence production, lexical retrieval and working memory. Thirteen patients (5 PPA-S, 3 PPA-NF, 3 PPA-L and 2 PPA-NC) were submitted to a standardized training either targetting naming deficits (PPA-S and PPA-NC), sentence production or production of multisyllabic words (PPA-NF) and naming deficits or working memory (PPA-L and PPA-NC), based on principles of errorless learning. Thirty-minute rehabilitation sessions were offered twice a week, with daily workouts at home. The trained items (pre and post-treatment) and untrained items (pre and post-treatment) were compared. Generalization to other language tasks and functional communication was also informed. Follow-up results are reported for three patients. The sample comprised 5 women and 8 men. Mean age was 65 years and mean schooling was 13.7 years. A significant improvement for treated items was seen for all patients. Nine patients also improved in untreated items. In addition, seven generalized for other tasks. Three patients were evaluated one month after the end of the treatment and demonstrated maintenance of treatment results. Even being a progressive syndrome, patients were able to relearn target vocabulary and strategies to improve sentence construction during the active phase of treatment. These preliminary results suggest that linguistic-based treatment strategies may constitute an effective approach in the clinical management of PPA patients.