Perfil Neuropsicológico das Alterações de Linguagem nas Demências Subcorticais da Substância Branca e Cinzenta

Abstract

In the twentieth century, it was believed that the injury cortical was the substrate of cerebral dysfunction neuropathological. Studies of dementia were primarily focused on disorders of the cerebral cortex and sub cortical gray region, which originated the concepts of cortical and subcortical dementia respectively. The report of dementia mainly involving the white brain received less attention. The aim of this study was to achieve a profile of changes in language and cognitive processes involved in changes in the white sub cortical dementia (DSB) and dementia sub cortical gray (DSC) and then compared with the control group and among themselves. Thus 15 patients were evaluated with DSB, 8 with DSC and 14 control subjects. We applied the following tests: Boston for Diagnostic of Aphasia Examination (BDAE), the Boston Naming Test (BNT), Token Test, Verbal fluency - semantic category and board Theft of biscuits. The results showed that the subcortical group showed worse performance with the control group, showing significant differences in the Boston Naming Test and on the evidence of comprehension and oral production and graphics for the Boston Diagnostic Test of Aphasia. The DSB group showed more significant changes when compared with the control group than in the comparison between DSC X control group. Despite the language is related to cortical involvement, our study showed that such changes are found in subcortical dementia and receiving influence of cognitive processes involved in language. Symptoms of changes in language were similar between groups subcortical, but in greater or lesser degree of commitment. The DSB group showed more impairment of comprehension and oral apraxia and DSC group is highlighted by changes in prosody and the presence of hyperkinetic dysarthria.