‘Native tongue matters’ in dementia-related speech evaluation
Patients with nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia could be misdiagnosed, researchers warn
English and Italian speakers with nonfluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA) display different patterns of speech impairment, researchers report.
Dr Elisa Canu, from IRCCS San Raffaele Scientific Institute, Milan, and colleagues, compared patterns of speech and language errors between speech samples in monolingual English and Italian speakers with a diagnosis of nfvPPA.
Disease duration was significantly longer in the English speakers than in the Italian patients. English speakers also had significantly more years of education (mean, 16.10 years vs 9.17 years) and performed better on tests assessing syntactic comprehension.
The groups did not differ in performance on memory or executive function evaluations.
