Logopenic Progressive Aphasia and its characterisation

In this week’s show Dr Anna Volkmer takes the chair to talk with Shalom Henderson and Dr Siddharth Ramanan from the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (CBU) at the University of Cambridge, discussing their research on Understanding Logopenic Variant Primary Progressive Aphasia (lvPPA).

People with lvPPA have increasing trouble thinking of the words they want to say. As time goes on, people with lvPPA have more trouble getting the words out, and they eventually begin to speak slower and slower.

The cause of lvPPA is unknown, we do know that in lvPPA there is a large build-up of amyloid and tau within brain cells, like in Alzheimer’s disease. As more and more proteins form in brain, the cells lose their ability to function and eventually die. This causes the affected parts of the brain, most often the left posterior temporal cortex and inferior parietal lobe, to shrink.

Most people with lvPPA start to have symptoms in their 50s, although some people have shown signs earlier or later.

While speech production skills are spared, people with lvPPA gradually have more trouble finding the words they want to use. For example, they may often pause to find the right word. They may develop problems with working memory, and as a result, they might have increasing difficulty repeating sentences and phrases, or following lengthy instructions. They may also begin to have some trouble naming people and objects. People with lvPPA generally do not lose the ability to understand words, as is the case in the semantic variant.

Later in the disease, people with lvPPA may have such difficulty finding words that they might stop speaking completely. Difficulties with memory may develop or get worse, and reading and writing may become harder. Sometimes, later symptoms of lvPPA include getting lost or having trouble recognising people.

lvPPA is a disease that changes with time. A person with lvPPA can live many years with the disease, although this can vary from person to person.

Whilst there are no drug treatments to speak of, Speech and Language Therapists such as our guests today are working on ways to better understand this disease, and to find ways to support people living with it, and their carers and family members to support them.

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