Gesture profiles distinguish primary progressive aphasia variants: A preliminary study.
Haley C Dresang, Rand Williamson, Hana Kim and 2 others
PMID 39677853WHAT IT FOUND
In 19 people with primary progressive aphasia, those with the semantic variant had worse imitation of meaningful hand postures than of arm movements, unlike the other variants.
This may help clinicians suspect semantic variant, not confirm it.
Key findings
01For meaningful gestures, svPPA were the only PPA variant with hand posture more impaired than kinematics, and no svPPA participant had better hand posture than kinematics.
02Across the PPA group, meaningless gestures were imitated less accurately than meaningful gestures.
03After controlling for dementia severity and time since diagnosis, svPPA showed weak evidence of greater overall gesture impairment than other PPA variants.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small: 19 adults total, with only 4 in the svPPA group. The study used a convenience sample and remote Zoom testing, so 62 gesture component scores were missing or uninterpretable, mostly because the hand or arm was out of camera view. Two lvPPA participants stopped testing before completing both tasks, which increased missing data in that group. Only participants with PPA were enrolled, and neurotypical comparison data came from a previous paper. The study did not test intransitive gestures, such as waving, which are common in everyday communication. Dementia severity and semantic measures were not correlated with gesture task performance, so the relationship between language severity and gesture deficits remains unclear.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use this as a diagnostic test for svPPA. The finding came from 19 participants, including only 4 with svPPA, and the authors call it preliminary.