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White matter changes in corticobasal degeneration syndrome and correlation with limb apraxia

BACKGROUND: Data on white matter changes in corticobasal degeneration syndrome (CBDS) are not yet available, whereas cortical gray matter loss is a feature of this condition. The structural abnormalities related to a key feature of CBDS (limb …

Performance in specific language tasks correlates with regional volume changes in progressive aphasia

BACKGROUND: Patterns of language impairment have long been used clinically to localize brain damage in stroke patients. The same approach might be useful in the differential diagnosis of progressive aphasia owing to neurodegenerative disease. …

Progressive nonfluent aphasia and its characteristic motor speech deficits

Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) is a clinical syndrome characterized by motor speech impairment and agrammatism, with relative sparing of single word comprehension and semantic memory. PNFA has been associated with the characteristic pattern of …

The neural cost of the auditory perception of language switches: an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study in bilinguals

One of the most remarkable abilities of bilinguals is to produce and/or to perceive a switch from one language to the other without any apparent difficulty. However, several psycholinguistic studies indicate that producing, recognizing, and …

Anatomical correlates of sentence comprehension and verbal working memory in neurodegenerative disease

This study investigates whether sentence comprehension and nonsyntactic verbal working memory (vWM) are sustained by the same or by different neural systems. Scores in a sentence-picture matching task and in digits backward (DB) were correlated with …

A tensor based morphometry study of longitudinal gray matter contraction in FTD

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by progressive behavioural abnormalities and frontotemporal atrophy. Here we used tensor based morphometry (TBM) to identify regions of longitudinal progression of gray matter …

Evidence of white matter changes on diffusion tensor imaging in frontotemporal dementia

BACKGROUND: Two major clinical variants of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) have been described: frontal variant (fvFTD) and temporal variant (tvFTD). OBJECTIVE: To analyze white matter (WM) and gray matter (GM) tissue organization in patients with …

Late acquisition of literacy in a native language

With event-related functional MRI (fMRI) and with behavioral measures we studied the brain processes underlying the acquisition of native language literacy. Adult dialect speakers were scanned while reading words belonging to three different …

Anatomical correlates of early mutism in progressive nonfluent aphasia

Patients with progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA) can become mute early in the course of the disease. Voxel-based morphometry showed that PNFA is associated with left anterior insula and inferior frontal atrophy. In PNFA with early mutism, volume …

Neuropsychological deficits and neural dysfunction in familial dyslexia

We report the neuropsychological profile and the pattern of brain activity during reading tasks in a sample of familial dyslexics. We studied our subjects with an in-depth neuropsychological assessment and with functional neuroimaging (fMRI) during …