Vascular aphasia outcome after intravenous recombinant tissue plasminogen activator thrombolysis for ischemic stroke.

Introduction: No data about the specific outcome of aphasia after thrombolysis are available. Our aim was to describe the severity and type of aphasia after stroke thrombolysis.

Methods: This retrospective cohort study included consecutive aphasic patients hospitalized in the Stroke Unit of Dijon (University Hospital, France) between 2004 and 2009 for a first-ever ischemic stroke of the left middle cerebral artery.

[Semantic dementia: reflexions of a French working group for diagnostic criteria and constitution of a patient cohort].

Semantic dementia (SD) is a syndrome of progressive loss of semantic knowledge for objects and people. International criteria propose that SD be included in the frontotemporal lobar degeneration syndromes, with progressive non-fluent aphasia and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). However, several related syndromes have been defined that clinically and conceptually share both similarities and differences with SD: fluent progressive aphasia, progressive prosopagnosia, temporal variant of FTD.

[Writing disorder using a word processor: role of the left hand].

A young female secretary developed a writing disorder, exclusively expressed when using a word processor, following an ischemic vascular event involving the insula and the right posterior parietal region. There was no disturbance of laterality. The neurological examination, completed by neuropsychological tests eliminated any persistent phasic or gnostic disorders.

[Crossed alexia-agraphia in a right-handed patient].

A right-handed man, born of a right-handed family, presented an infarct in the territory of the right middle cerebral artery, with a left hemiplegia, a left lateral homonymous hemianopsia and an expression aphasia. The oral trouble disappeared in some weeks, but later a permanent linguistic deficit persisted, affecting mainly the written language and realizing a clinical picture of alexia-agraphia with Gerstmann's syndrome. The neurolinguistic study showed a preferential alteration of the phonologic system in the written language, and at a lesser degree in the oral modality.