The anatomical bases of semantic retrieval deficits in early Alzheimer's disease.

Semantic abilities deteriorate early in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and their residual language is characterised by strong lexical effects such as the age of acquisition of words and their typicality. The anatomical bases of this early semantic degradation have not been fully explored. To clarify which neural structures, when atrophic, alter lexical-semantic function in patients with very mild AD, this study correlated the lexical attributes of words produced in a semantic fluency task with grey matter density values from 3D MRI scans of mild AD patients.