Long-Term maintenance of anomia treatment effects in primary progressive aphasia.

Eleven participants withdrew before completing treatment or the post-treatment evaluation, and four of them withdrew because they did not think the treatments were beneficial. The sample became smaller over time: 26 participants completed all four naming tasks at one month, 21 completed oral naming at eight months, and 16 completed oral naming at 15 months. Only 5 participants with the semantic variant completed, and only 11 participants had words initially misnamed at baseline, so subtype-specific and treatment-of-misnamed-word results are small. Each participant received both phonological and orthographic treatment over the same six months, so the study compares item sets within the same people rather than separate treatment groups. In the nonfluent/agrammatic variant, worsening verbal apraxia may have obscured naming effects. Subtype diagnosis in some advanced cases relied partly on earlier testing, and additional deficits developed before baseline.

Do not read the 15-month maintenance claim as applying to all treated words. For words initially misnamed, no treatment effect was significant at 15 months, and only 16 participants completed oral naming at that time point.