Case 32 - Man with problems with reading and calculating

Summary

This chapter presents a case study of a 69-year-old right-handed man who was presented in June 2006 with a 1-year history of progressive word finding difficulties and mild phono-articulatory problems. It provides the general history, family history, examination, initial diagnosis and follow-up data of the patient. In a simple delayed recall test, he was able to remember five out of ten figures, which is considered slightly impaired. Based on the overall clinical, neuropsychological, language, and neuroimaging data, a diagnosis of Progressive Non-Fluent Aphasia (PNFA) was made. Duloxetine was started for the depressive symptoms with good clinical response. Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome characterized by progressive dissolution of language with relative preservation of other cognitive abilities for at least 1 to 2 years. Recent studies have classified the clinical presentations of PPA into three main subtypes: agrammatic, logopenic, and semantic variant.