1/116. rehabilitation of a case of pure alexia: exploiting residual abilities.We present a case study of a 43-year-old woman with chronic and stable pure alexia. Using a multiple baseline design we report the results of two different interventions to improve reading. First, a restitutive treatment approach using an implicit semantic access strategy was attempted. This approach was designed to exploit privileged access to lexical-semantic representations and met with little success. Treatment was then switched to a substitutive treatment strategy, which involved using the patient's finger to pretend to copy the letters in words and sentences. reading using this motor cross-cuing strategy was 100% accurate and doubled in speed after 4 weeks of intervention. We propose that this patient's inability to benefit from the implicit semantic access treatment approach may be in part related to her inability to suppress the segmental letter identification process of word recognition.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 1keywords = reading, alexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
2/116. Treatment of naming disorders: new issues regarding old therapies.I report a series of single case studies involving an aphasic patient, H.G., which illustrates both the usefulness and the limitations of cognitive neuropsychological models and methods in aphasia rehabilitation. The first set of experiments analyze H.G.'s pattern of performance across lexical tasks in order to identify the loci of her damage to the cognitive mechanisms underlying the tasks of naming, comprehension, repetition, reading, and spelling. The second set of studies evaluates her response to two different types of treatment and identifies a few of the variables that influence the effectiveness of treatment.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.24945928751254keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
3/116. On some neurobiological and cultural-anthropological aspects of the contralateral-neglect syndrome.Contralateral neglect is a frequent clinical syndrome which can be provoked by lesions in several brain areas (primarily inferior parietal and frontal) and includes symptoms of motor and perceptual negligence of both real and imaginative contralateral hemi-space. Attentional and representative theories attempting to explain neglect are presently the most popular. This paper analyzes two cases of neglect patients. Paying attention especially to their reading defects, a possible role of the persons with contralateral neglect is proposed in the development of script. Other neurobiological and cultural-anthropological questions arising from the analysis of these cases are also discussed.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.24945928751254keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
4/116. When the left brain is not right the right brain may be left: report of personal experience of occipital hemianopia.OBJECTIVES: To make a personal report of a hemianopia due to an occipital infarct, sustained by a professor of neurology. methods: Verbatim observation of neurological phenomena recorded during the acute illness. RESULTS: Hemianopia, visual hallucinations, and non-occipital deficits without extraoccipital lesions on MRI, are described and discussed. CONCLUSIONS: Hemianopia, due to an occipital infarct, without alexia, is not a disability which precludes a normal professional career. Neurorehabilitation has not been necessary.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.15032399252873keywords = alexia, disability (Clic here for more details about this article) |
5/116. An acute sign of ischemic infarction: the hyperdense middle cerebral artery.Ischemic cerebrovascular accidents are a leading cause of death with significant disability common among the survivors. The hyperdense artery sign seen on computed tomography is a useful finding in the early recognition of nonhemorrhagic cerebral infarction. We report a case of a hyperdense middle cerebral artery.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.00021585003123955keywords = disability (Clic here for more details about this article) |
6/116. Psychological management of intractable seizures in an adolescent with a learning disability.Psychological interventions aimed at seizure management are described with a 14-year-old boy with a learning disability and intractable epilepsy. Baseline records suggested that a majority of tonic seizures and 'drop attacks' were associated with going off to sleep and by environmental 'startles'. Psychological formulation implicated sudden changes in arousal levels as an underlying mechanism of action. Cognitive-behavioural countermeasures were employed to alter arousal levels and processes in different ways in different 'at-risk' situations. A multiple baseline design was used to control for non-specific effects of interventions on non-targeted seizures. Results suggested significant declines in the number of sleep onset and startle-response seizures were attained by these methods. Gains were maintained at 2-month follow-up.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.0010792501561978keywords = disability (Clic here for more details about this article) |
7/116. Alexia for Braille following bilateral occipital stroke in an early blind woman.Recent functional imaging and neurophysiologic studies indicate that the occipital cortex may play a role in Braille reading in congenitally and early blind subjects. We report on a woman blind from birth who sustained bilateral occipital damage following an ischemic stroke. Prior to the stroke, the patient was a proficient Braille reader. Following the stroke, she was no longer able to read Braille yet her somatosensory perception appeared otherwise to be unchanged. This case supports the emerging evidence for the recruitment of striate and prestriate cortex for Braille reading in early blind subjects.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.49891857502508keywords = reading (Clic here for more details about this article) |
8/116. Cerebral venous infarction following thrombosis of the draining vein of a venous angioma (developmental abnormality).We report two cases of cerebral venous angioma presenting as venous infarction, one in the left parietal lobe, the other in the left frontal lobe. Cerebral imaging demonstrated thrombotic occlusion of the draining vein of the venous angioma associated in the latter case with thrombosis of the anterior part of the superior longitudinal sinus. Both patients were free of coagulopathy. They were treated with anticoagulant therapy. One completely recovered, while the other was left with slight residual disability. thrombosis of the draining vein has been reported in only 6 previous cases, of whom only 2 received anticoagulant therapy. Discovery of a venous angioma in the diagnostic workup of a patient with recent neurological disorders should raise the question of a possible occlusion of the draining vein and lead to an appropriate therapy.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.00021585003123955keywords = disability (Clic here for more details about this article) |
9/116. Intact verbal description of letters with diminished awareness of their forms.Visual processing and its conscious awareness can be dissociated. To examine the extent of dissociation between ability to read characters or words and to be consciously aware of their forms, reading ability and conscious awareness for characters were examined using a tachistoscope in an alexic patient. A right handed woman with 14 years of education presented with incomplete right hemianopia, alexia with kanji (ideogram) agraphia, anomia, and amnesia. brain MRI disclosed cerebral infarction limited to the left lower bank of the calcarine fissure, lingual and parahippocampal gyri, and an old infarction in the right medial frontal lobe. Tachistoscopic examination disclosed that she could read characters aloud in the right lower hemifield when she was not clearly aware of their forms and only noted their presence vaguely. Although her performance in reading kanji was better in the left than the right field, she could read kana (phonogram) characters and Arabic numerals equally well in both fields. By contrast, she claimed that she saw only a flash of light in 61% of trials and noticed vague forms of stimuli in 36% of trials. She never recognised a form of a letter in the right lower field precisely. She performed judgment tasks better in the left than right lower hemifield where she had to judge whether two kana characters were the same or different. Although dissociation between performance of visual recognition tasks and conscious awareness of the visual experience was found in patients with blindsight or residual vision, reading (verbal identification) of characters without clear awareness of their forms has not been reported in clinical cases. Diminished awareness of forms in our patient may reflect incomplete input to the extrastriate cortex.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.89848600503511keywords = reading, alexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
10/116. language and calculation within the parietal lobe: a combined cognitive, anatomical and fMRI study.We report the case of a patient (ATH) who suffered from aphasia, deep dyslexia, and acalculia, following a lesion in her left perisylvian area. She showed a severe impairment in all tasks involving numbers in a verbal format, such as reading aloud, writing to dictation, or responding verbally to questions of numerical knowledge. In contrast, her ability to manipulate non-verbal representations of numbers, i.e., Arabic numerals and quantities, was comparatively well preserved, as evidenced for instance in number comparison or number bisection tasks. This dissociated impairment of verbal and non-verbal numerical abilities entailed a differential impairment of the four arithmetic operations. ATH performed much better with subtraction and addition, that can be solved on the basis of quantity manipulation, than with multiplication and division problems, that are commonly solved by retrieving stored verbal sequences. The brain lesion affected the classical language areas, but spared a subset of the left inferior parietal lobule that was active during calculation tasks, as demonstrated with functional MRI. Finally, the relative preservation of subtraction versus multiplication may be related to the fact that subtraction activated the intact right parietal lobe, while multiplication activated predominantly left-sided areas.- - - - - - - - - - ranking = 0.41285772771002keywords = reading, dyslexia (Clic here for more details about this article) |
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