Publications by authors named "G Battistella"
Laryngeal dystonia (LD) is an isolated, task-specific, focal dystonia characterized by intermittent spasms of laryngeal muscles impairing speech production. Although recent studies have demonstrated neural alterations in LD, the consistency of findings across studies is not well-established, limiting their translational applicability. We conducted a systematic literature search to identify studies reporting stereotactic coordinates of peak structural and functional abnormalities in LD patients compared to healthy controls, followed by a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis.
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- The study focused on primary progressive aphasia (PPA) in native Chinese speakers, highlighting the unique challenges posed by the classifier system in Chinese compared to Indo-European languages.
- Results showed that both semantic variant (sv) PPA and logopenic variant (lv) PPA patients struggled significantly with classifier production, with lvPPA patients performing better in recognition tasks.
- The findings indicate that classifier processing could serve as a linguistic marker for distinguishing between different PPA variants, with performance linked to specific brain regions involved in language and visual processing.
Article Synopsis
- The study explores the impact of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) variants—nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), and semantic (svPPA)—on non-verbal cognitive abilities, specifically processing speed, using a non-verbal task called Match.
- Results show that lvPPA and nfvPPA patients performed worse on the task compared to healthy controls and svPPA patients.
- Neuroimaging revealed that poorer task performance correlated with reduced gray and white matter volumes in key brain regions associated with processing speed and executive control.
Article Synopsis
- - The non-fluent/agrammatic variant of primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) is characterized by symptoms like apraxia of speech and expressive agrammatism, leading to varying speech-language difficulties among patients over time.
- - There is ongoing debate about whether to classify subtypes of nfvPPA based on symptom presence, including 'primary progressive apraxia of speech' and 'progressive agrammatic aphasia', but overlapping features challenge clear distinctions.
- - In a study involving 104 patients, researchers linked specific brain atrophy to varying speech-language symptoms, identifying that the neural correlates for both apraxia of speech and expressive agrammatism are located in the left posterior inferior frontal
Background And Objective: Laryngeal dystonia (LD) is focal task-specific dystonia, predominantly affecting speech but not whispering or emotional vocalizations. Prior neuroimaging studies identified brain regions forming a dystonic neural network and contributing to LD pathophysiology. However, the underlying temporal dynamics of these alterations and their contribution to the task-specificity of LD remain largely unknown.
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