A produção discursiva oral na demência f rontotemporal e na demência semântica: uma análise neuropsicolinguística

Abstract

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is the second most common cause of primarily degenerative dementia in individuals under the age of 65. Recently, a subtype of FTD with greater involvement of the right hemisphere was described, with some clinical characteristics different from the left-predominant subtype of FTD. Little is known about the linguistic characteristics, especially regarding narrative discourse in the right DFT. The objectives of this work are: to describe and analyze oral discursive production in frontotemporal dementia and to compare the following subgroups: a right FTD sample, a left FTD sample, as well as participants with semantic dementia. For this, data obtained in linguistic tasks were analyzed, through oral narrative based on a sequence of pictures and proverbs and metaphors tasks. This is a crosssectional descriptive study with a sample consisting of 20 participants. Initially, all patients were evaluated and were subsequently divided into 3 groups (right DFT 8, left DFT 4 and DS 8). The main results showed that participants with FTD, predominantly on the right, showed more difficulties in organizing the structure of the narrative, presenting difficulties in developing the theme. It was noted that participants ramble on unrelated topics, with problems connecting events to build the story. The DS group presented a more organized narrative production, but had more semantic errors, with the use of generic words and mistaken naming, as well as incomplete and missing content, which compromises local and global connectivity. Thus, it was noted that the behavioral variant FTD presented difficulties in planning narrative discourse, especially with a predominance on the right, and the DS group also presented difficulties in constructing the story, due to impairment in semantic memory