Alexia, or acquired dyslexia, refers to a deficit in reading following damage to the brain in previously literate individuals. Alexia is different from developmental dyslexia, which is a developmental deficit in learning to read.

What causes alexia?

Alexia Without Agraphia Pure alexia is usually caused by an occlusion of distal (posterior) branches of the left posterior cerebral artery. The resultant damage is believed to interrupt the transfer of neural information from the visual cortex to the language cortex.

What is alexia aphasia?

Abstract. Alexia is an acquired disturbance in reading. Alexias that occur after left hemisphere damage typically result from linguistic deficits and may occur as isolated symptoms or as part of an aphasia syndrome.

What is alexia also known as?

Pure alexia is also known as: alexia without agraphia, letter-by-letter dyslexia, spelling dyslexia, or word-form dyslexia.

How is alexia diagnosed?

Diagnosis is based on the symptom of not being able to read, but the patient still maintains visual acuity and the ability to write. Patients often have right homonymous hemianopia due to left occipital lobe involvement. Neuropsychometric testing may also be used to diagnose alexia without agraphia.

What is Disgrafia?

Dysgraphia is a learning disability characterized by problems with writing. It’s a neurological disorder that can affect children or adults. In addition to writing words that are difficult to read, people with dysgraphia tend to use the wrong word for what they’re trying to communicate.

What part of the brain causes alexia?

Alexia without agraphia or pure alexia is an acquired disorder secondary to a defect in the left occipitotemporal region affecting the visual word form area (VWFA). In this condition, most of the patients have right-sided homonymous hemianopia due to the involvement of the occipital lobe [1].

What is Enomia?

Anomia is defined as a language specific disturbance arising after brain damage whose main symptom is the inability of retrieving known words.

What is the difference between alexia and agraphia?

Agraphia is the loss of the ability to write. Aphasia usually refers to the loss of the ability to speak. Alexia, on the other hand, is the loss of the ability to recognize words you once could read. For that reason, alexia is sometimes called “word blindness.”

What is Gerstmann syndrome?

Definition. Gerstmann’s syndrome is a cognitive impairment that results from damage to a specific area of the brain — the left parietal lobe in the region of the angular gyrus. It may occur after a stroke or in association with damage to the parietal lobe.

Can you recover from alexia?

In summary, the existing evidence on recovery from pure alexia, while scarce, is not fully convergent. Some of the reported cases seem to reacquire a reading-related region analogous to the VWFA in ventral occipito-temporal cortex, either near the lesion, or in the contralateral hemisphere.

Can alexia be treated?

Very generally, the treatment methods used for (pure) alexia can be divided in three groups, depending on which level of the reading process they aim to ameliorate: letter identification, word reading, or text reading.

What is Dysorthographia?

Dysorthography is a writing disability that develops in children as a difficulty to write words correctly and follow grammatical rules. They have difficulties with sounds and writing. This disorder tends to affect children who have other language disorders or delays, such as dyslexia.

What is dyscalculia?

Dyscalculia is a term referring to a wide range of difficulties with maths, including weaknesses in understanding the meaning of numbers, and difficulty applying mathematical principles to solve problems.

What causes dyscalculia?

Here are two possible causes of dyscalculia: Genes and heredity: Dyscalculia tends to run in families. Research shows that genetics may also play a part in problems with math. Brain development: Brain imaging studies have shown some differences between people with and without dyscalculia.

How is pure Alexia treated?

Two patients with pure alexia were treated using kinesthetic reading (reading by tracing or copying the outline of each letter with the patient’s finger). The results clearly demonstrated that both patients significantly improved their reading and copying performances.

What is ideational dyspraxia?

Ideational Dyspraxia. The person with ideational dyspraxia has damage to the areas of the brain which are responsible for processing and planning an action. They have lost the ‘concept’ of how to perform actions in order to use an object.

What causes Ideomotor apraxia?

Cause. The most common cause of ideomotor apraxia is a unilateral ischemic lesion to the brain, which is damage to one hemisphere of the brain due to a disruption of the blood supply, as in a stroke. There are a variety of brain areas where lesions have been correlated to ideomotor apraxia.

What is Broca’s aphasia?

Broca’s aphasia is a non-fluent type. Broca’s aphasia results from damage to a part of the brain called Broca’s area, which is located in the frontal lobe, usually on the left side. It’s one of the parts of the brain responsible for speech and for motor movement.

What is Agrammatic?

Agrammatism is a form of speech production, often associated with Broca’s aphasia, in which grammar appears relatively inaccessible. In severe agrammatism, sentences comprise only strings of nouns; in milder forms, functor words (e.g., articles, auxiliary verbs) and inflectional affixes are omitted or substituted.

What is slurred speech?

Slurred speech or speech disorders are a symptom characterized by the poor pronunciation of words, mumbling, or a change in speed or rhythm during a conversation. The medical term for speech disorders is dysarthria. Speech disorders may develop slowly over time or follow a single incident.