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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
For the first time, Northwestern Medicine scientists have pinpointed the location of dysfunctional brain networks that lead to impaired sentence production and word finding in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a form of dementia in which patients often lose their language rather than their memory or thought process.
With this discovery, the scientists have drawn a map that illustrates three regions in the brain that fail to talk to each another, inhibiting a person's speech production, word finding and word comprehension. For example, some people can't connect words to form sentences, others can't name objects or understand single words like "cow" or "table."
The map can be used to target those brain regions with therapies, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), to potentially improve an affected person's speech.
"Now we know where to target people's brains to attempt to improve their speech," said lead author Dr. Borna Bonakdarpour, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer Disease Center and a Northwestern Medicine neurologist.
PPA occurs in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal degeneration.
Interactions among three main regions in the brain is responsible for how people process words and sentences. PPA occurs when there is a lack of connectivity among these areas. Different patterns of connectivity failure among these regions can cause different subtypes of PPA.
The findings will be published Sept. 1 in the journal Cortex. The large study (73 patients) recruited from the extensive pool of patients with PPA at Northwestern's Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer Disease Center, one of the largest centers in the world.
(Score: 5, Informative) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday September 04 2019, @02:15PM (1 child)
It is marked Anterior Temporal Lobe, and appears to be in Broadman Area 38 [wikipedia.org] or possibly Brodman area 21 [wikipedia.org]. Reference here [hindawi.com] describes Area 38 as being related to semantic processing. This makes sense given that the TFA diagram shows it's involved in the semantic domain of progressive aphasia. The unique bit is that all three areas are involved in PPA-S where the other two are both involved in the other forms. Interestingly, 38 is also one of the first areas where damage begins in Alzheimer's.
As Wikipedia will tell you, for a long time it was thought that Broca's area was responsible for productive aphasia and Wernicke's area responsible for receptive aphasia, but this view is evolving. (Broca = "can understand the speech but can't formulate own", Wernicke = "Can't understand the words that are being said to one.", 38 = "might hear and say pencil but not link up what a pencil is when one sees it"). What's being gotten at in TFA, I think, is a better understanding of how the signalling patterns work in each of these areas to coordinate the reception/understanding/production. Just because we knew about those regions doesn't mean that there is much of a clue about what to do about them when problems happen. (Although, again Wikipedia repeats, if damage to Broca's was slow enough it appeared that surrounding regions would adapt the function of Broca's area).
The other issue to remember is that the brain is three dimensional... just because one looks at a sagital view of the brain with a dot on it doesn't really spell exactly where the spots are laterally.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 06 2019, @01:20AM
Thanks, really appreciate the clarity gained through your explanation.