[Slowly progressive fluent aphasia--clinical features and an imaging study including MRI, SPECT and PET]

Three cases of slowly progressive fluent aphasia were presented. In all it began with word amnesia or stuttering, and in one to five years impairment of auditory comprehension, and reading and writing difficulties with kanji (Japanese morphograms) appeared. The neuropsychological and radiological findings were as follows: Case 1: a right-handed 65-year-old man showed severe fluent aphasia (the Western Aphasia Battery profile was rated as corresponding to Wernicke's aphasia but his score on the Token test was too high for Wernicke's aphasia) and memory disturbance. Cortical atrophy was prominent in the left temporal and parietal lobes. Hypoperfusion was evident in the bilateral anterior temporal region, suggesting the diagnosis of Pick's disease. Case 2: a right-handed 42-year-old man presented amnesic aphasia with buccofacial and ideomotor apraxia. The left frontal, temporal and parietal lobes were all atrophic. Hypoperfusion was marked in the left perisylvian and temporo-parietal regions, being similar to the pattern of Mesulam's slowly progressive aphasia. Case 3: a right-handed 55-year-old man with amnesic aphasia. Left-side dominant cortical atrophy involved the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes. The metabolic rate was lower in the left anterior temporal lobe, compatible with the finding in Pick's disease. The common clinical features of these patients were selective deficits in vocabulary, resulting in impairment of confrontation naming, and auditory comprehension. They sometimes could not recognize things even when they were told their names; case 1 could not even point to objects on command, while their syntactic comprehension was well preserved.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)