Shave, shear, shred, or cut: PPA variant differentially impacts erroneous responses produced in a confrontation naming test of verbs.
Ashley Raman, Argye E Hillis, Melissa D Stockbridge
PMID 39056000WHAT IT FOUND
When people with primary progressive aphasia name actions incorrectly, the wrong words differ by variant.
Logopenic errors were more general, with many meanings; nonfluent errors were more concrete. This may inform diagnosis, not treatment.
Key findings
01Errors were more frequent and learned earlier than the target verbs, but the PPA variants did not differ on these two measures.
02Logopenic PPA produced error responses that were more general, with more distinct meanings, than the target verbs, and more so than nonfluent/agrammatic PPA.
03Nonfluent/agrammatic PPA produced errors that were more concrete relative to the target verbs than logopenic PPA and semantic PPA errors did.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used existing clinical records rather than a new trial designed to test a treatment or diagnostic rule. Variant classification can change as disease progresses. 19 of 271 patients had a variant change that affected visit labelling. Genetic data were not available for the sample. Some error words were absent from the corpora used for semantic density and concreteness, so 17 participants were dropped from those analyses and only 254 remained. The authors averaged responses across visits, which can hide different patterns within the same patient. Errors included verbs, nouns and adjectives. The design could not separate whether word choice reflected lexical qualities or momentary task forgetting. The HANA verbs are already highly concrete, which affects the comparison between target verbs and errors. The authors said the nonfluent concreteness finding needs cautious interpretation. The unclassifiable PPA group was small and mixed, including early, late and possibly different underlying conditions.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these error patterns as a stand-alone diagnostic test or as evidence that a treatment works. The study analysed naming errors retrospectively, the nonfluent concreteness finding was affected by the test's already concrete verbs, and the authors said the patterns may only be part of a larger diagnostic picture.