[Alterations in the imitation of gestures (conduction apraxia)].

INTRODUCTION AND AIMS

The aim of this presentation is to report the performance pattern of a patient who suffered ideomotor apraxia with a disorder pattern of the conduction apraxia (CA) type. This clinical picture was originally reported by Ochipa et al. in 1994 as an alteration in the pathway that joins the two lexicons; later, in 2000, Cubelli et al. claimed that there is no evidence for the existence of such a pathway and suggested that the symptoms were due to an alteration affecting the mechanisms governing visuomotor conversion.

CASE REPORT

A 51 year old patient who, following a traumatic head injury, presented aphasia and apraxia with 40% errors in the imitation of familiar gestures test, 50% errors in the imitation of non familiar gestures (NFG), 0% errors in the visual admission of objects test and 0% in the tool usage test. The differences between the performance in the imitation tests and in the other tests are statistically significant. Although the patient displayed slight alterations in the gesture decision test (20% mistakes), alterations to the action input lexicon would not account for the patient's performance since there is a significant difference between his performance in the imitation of NFG test and the gesture decision test. Moreover, he did not present alterations in the discrimination of gestures.

CONCLUSIONS

From the above, it can be said that the patient seems to present CA due to alterations in the non semantic interlexical pathway and in the perilexical pathway, as originally postulated by Ochipa et al.