Slowly progressive aphasia: a four-year follow-up study

This paper reports the long-term follow-up of GC, a patient with primary pr ogressive aphasia of the fluent type. GC presented at onset with an anemia characterized by sparing of first letter knowledge. that applied mainly to proper names and living categories. No semantic deficits were observed in t he first stage of the disease, and MRI showed a left temporal lobe atrophy with a gradient from the pole to the posterior regions, the latter being le ss involved. Wt: now report the clinical evolution of GC from the 2nd to th e 4th year of disease. As the disease progressed, the anemia became more se vere and the phenomenon of first letter sparing was no longer detectable. A lso semantic knowledge was gradually affected and, eventually, was dramatic ally lost. However. no other cognitive deficits were seen at the last exami nation. By that time, the temporal atrophy shown by MRI was bilateral. alth ough still more evident on the left side. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. Al l rights reserved.