Impaired phonemic discrimination in logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia

• Published in: Annals of clinical and translational neurology Vol. 7; no. 7; pp. 1252 - 1257
• Main Authors: Johnson, Jeremy C. S., Jiang, Jessica, Bond, Rebecca L., Benhamou, Elia, Requena‐Komuro, Maï‐Carmen, Russell, Lucy L., Greaves, Caroline, Nelson, Annabel, Sivasathiaseelan, Harri, Marshall, Charles R., Volkmer, Anna P., Rohrer, Jonathan D., Warren, Jason D., Hardy, Chris J. D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States John Wiley & Sons, Inc 01-07-2020; John Wiley and Sons Inc; Wiley
• Subjects: Aged; Alzheimer Disease - pathology; Alzheimer Disease - physiopathology; Aphasia; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - classification; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - diagnosis; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - pathology; Aphasia, Primary Progressive - physiopathology; Brain research; Brief Communication; Brief Communications; Diagnosis, Differential; Female; Gender; Humans; Language Tests; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Middle Aged; Parietal Lobe - diagnostic imaging; Parietal Lobe - pathology; Patients; Psycholinguistics; Reading; Semantics; Variables
• ISSN: 2328-9503; 2328-9503
• DOI: 10.1002/acn3.51101

Logopenic variant primary progressive aphasia (lvPPA) is the least well defined of the major primary progressive aphasia (PPA) syndromes. We assessed phoneme discrimination in patients with PPA (semantic, nonfluent/agrammatic, and logopenic variants) and typical Alzheimer’s disease, relative to healthy age‐matched participants. The lvPPA group performed significantly worse than all other groups apart from tAD, after adjusting for auditory verbal working memory. In the combined PPA cohort, voxel‐based morphometry correlated phonemic discrimination score with grey matter in left angular gyrus. Our findings suggest that impaired phonemic discrimination may help differentiate lvPPA from other PPA subtypes, with important diagnostic and management implications.