[Recovery in aphasia (Part 2): Size and site of lesion]

The digitizer program was used to determine the size of the lesions by tracing them onto standardized matrices which were divided into 3000 point and corresponded to CT slices. Moreover, on the basis of the results of accumulated lesions on 127 cases with various types of aphasia, the highly involved sites were determined as Broca's area, Wernicke's area and conduction area, and the sizes of the lesions in each area were also determined. The correlation between these sizes of the lesions and recovery rates based on the 2 SLTA scores (initial and 3 months later) was studied. The results obtained were as follows: 1) The correlation coefficient between the size of total area and the initial SLTA score was -0.46, significant at p less than 0.01. The negative correlation means that the larger the lesion, the more severe the aphasia. This tendency was seen in all language aspects except "calculation" (i.e. hearing, speaking, reading, writing). A similar, highly significant negative correlation was obtained between the lesion sizes of Broca's area, Wernicke's area, conduction area and initial SLTA scores, but among the various types of aphasics, only the Broca aphasics have a highly significant negative correlation between lesion size and initial SLTA score. 2) The negative correlation between the size of total area and the recovery rate was observed. This tendency was seen especially in the expressive disorders, namely "speaking" and "writing". These findings indicate that the larger the lesions, the less overall recovery will occur in total language deficit and in speaking and writing disorders.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)