Writing fluency in patients with low-grade glioma before and after surgery.
Malin Antonsson, Charlotte Johansson, Lena Hartelius and 3 others
PMID 29411466WHAT IT FOUND
Patients with low-grade glioma wrote less fluently than healthy adults, but this gap vanished once typing speed was accounted for.
After surgery, writing slowed further and pauses before words increased, suggesting a decline in lexical retrieval or cognitive effort.
Key findings
01Before surgery, patients differed from controls on several writing measures, but after controlling for typing speed, only pauses within words remained significantly different.
02Three months after surgery, patients showed a significant decline in writing production rate and an increase in pauses before words compared to their pre-surgery baseline.
03Oral lexical retrieval scores (naming and word fluency) showed strong positive correlations with writing fluency after surgery, whereas only one correlation was significant before surgery.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Small sample size (20 patients) limits generalizability. Different picture sets were used for pre- and post-surgery tasks, which could introduce artefacts despite efforts to match difficulty. The reference group did not undergo oral lexical retrieval testing, so differences in underlying cognitive abilities between groups cannot be fully controlled. Typing speed was measured via a copy task, which may not be a pure measure of motor speed if cognitive load affects transcription.
Declared interests
None reported in the text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the pre-surgery writing deficits as purely linguistic. The study shows that once typing speed is accounted for, most differences between patients and controls disappear, suggesting the initial gap may be driven by motor or processing speed issues rather than language impairment alone.