Prophylaxis and remediation of anomia in the semantic and logopenic variants of primary progressive aphasia

ABSTRACT

This study evaluated the efficacy of phonological and orthographic treatments for anomia in the semantic and logopenic variants of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA and lvPPA, respectively). Both treatments were administered for 6 months. The treatment stimuli consisted of nouns that were consistently named correctly at baseline (prophylaxis items) and/or nouns that were consistently named incorrectly at baseline (remediation items). Oral naming accuracy was measured for trained and untrained picture exemplars, as well as matched items from an untrained condition (UC). Written naming and scene description tasks were also conducted. For all tasks, the change in naming accuracy from baseline to 1 month post-treatment was compared between the UC and each treatment condition. These comparisons indicated that both treatments were effective in the remediation and prophylaxis of anomia in both variants. Furthermore, generalisation to untrained exemplars occurred in both subtypes, whereas item generalisation occurred in lvPPA, and task generalisation was present in svPPA.

KEYWORDS:

• Treatment
• primary progressive aphasia
• anomia

Acknowledgements

We thank Rachael Campbell, Heidi Getz, and Kelli Sullivan for assistance with stimulus preparation, and we thank Melissa Newhart for assistance with data collection.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹Three of these studies (Croot et al., 2015; Henry et al., 2013; Newhart et al., 2009) included an additional participant with a different subtype of PPA.

²Other than the remote delivery of these sessions, the only procedural differences involved minor technical changes. Instead of E-Prime, custom stimulus presentation software was utilised for the telerehabilitation participants. For the practice sessions, the telerehabilitation participant's laptop was used to present the visual stimuli, instead of training cards. In the OTC, the participant copied each word onto a signature pad, rather than a sheet of paper.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the NIDCD under grant numbers [R01DC011317] and [R01DC011317-01AS1].