Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions
Neurocognitive patterns of verb production deficit therapy: a single case with logopenic variant Primary Progressive Aphasia
Poster Session B, Friday, October 25, 10:00 - 11:30 am, Great Hall 3 and 4
Sladjana Lukic1; 1School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Florida State University
Introduction Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by progressive deterioration of language. In a recent meta-analysis (Cotelli et al., 2020), 50 studies examined behavioral treatments for PPA; however, no prior studies have determined neural changes from pre- to post-treatment and tested for generalization effects across different contexts. This study determined word retrieval difficulties in an individual with logopenic variant PPA (lvPPA) and identified behavioral and neural changes after Verb Network Strengthening Treatment (VNeST; Edmonds et al., 2009). Methods Using a single-subject multiple baseline experimental design, we examined treatment effects in lvPPA and investigated which brain areas are used during task-based and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI/rs-fMRI). A 58-year-old male lvPPA underwent a VNeST of three-argument verbs over 13 weeks totaling 52 hours and completed the adaptive language mapping fMRI paradigm (Wilson et al., 2018) and rs-fMRI, capturing neural changes of verb-thematic networks before and after therapy. We examined the generalization from verb naming to other contexts (one- and two-argument verbs and noun production, sentence generation, and connected speech) and self-reported emotional experiences. Results The Quick Aphasia Battery (QAB) assessments revealed difficulties in word finding, repetition, and sentence processing, and a structural MRI of the brain shows left lateralized temporoparietal atrophy, consistent with lvPPA diagnoses. The participant generally improved verb naming and increased performance by approximately 47% on the treated items (ES.h =0.9) but not on untreated items (ES.h = -0.2). Moreover, the participant showed at least a 20% performance increase on the Picture Naming and Repetition sections of the QAB from pre- to post-therapy. The connected speech aphasic features were reduced, indicating that the lvPPA’s overall communication abilities improved due to VNeST by eliciting nouns and verbs as co-units. Functional imaging results showed that at the macro level, language organization was similar to healthy controls (Wilson et al., 2018) as well as pre- to post-therapy. Lastly, pre- and post-self-reported emotional experiences and improvements in perceived communicative ability were observed. Conclusions Taken together, these findings allow us to better understand the neural correlates of verbs and their thematic role processing ability and compensate for their impairment in individuals with PPA. Finally, naming skills across nouns and verbs are critical to detect and treat, and the study indicates that the verb-thematic network is strengthened in lvPPA through forming substantive connections between the neural substrate for each agent-patient pair and the verb itself, and related verbs and their thematic pairs.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Speech-Language Treatment