Savage Sharon A, Piguet Olivier, Hodges John R
Neuroscience Research Australia, Sydney, Australia Faculty of Medicine, School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
J Alzheimers Dis. 2014;40(2):309-17. doi: 10.3233/JAD-131826.
Anomia is a common and debilitating symptom for many dementia sufferers, but is particularly marked in patients with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia, semantic dementia (SD). Recent studies have demonstrated that through cognitive training these patients can re-learn the names of objects, but it remains unclear whether this translates to improved use of these relearned words in contexts other than picture naming.
Five SD patients completed a 2-month, online word training program and were assessed pre- and post-intervention on picture naming and spoken word-picture-matching plus two novel ecological tasks: video description and responses to verbal requests.
All participants showed clear gains in naming the trained pictures (p < 0.001). Importantly, improvements were also observed for four out of the five patients on the video description task. Milder patients also demonstrated improved comprehension of verbal instructions. Severe SD patients showed improvements on matching trained words to pictures. As expected, improvements were not found for untrained items.
There was clear evidence of generalization especially in patients with milder semantic impairments. Future studies should investigate the utility of this training in other forms of dementia.
命名障碍是许多痴呆症患者常见且使人衰弱的症状，但在原发性进行性失语的语义变异型患者，即语义性痴呆（SD）中尤为明显。最近的研究表明，通过认知训练，这些患者可以重新学习物体的名称，但尚不清楚这是否能转化为在图片命名以外的情境中对这些重新学习的单词的更好运用。
五名语义性痴呆患者完成了一个为期两个月的在线单词训练项目，并在干预前后接受了图片命名和口语单词-图片匹配评估，以及两项新的生态任务：视频描述和对口头请求的回应。
所有参与者在命名训练过的图片方面都有明显进步（p < 0.001）。重要的是，五名患者中有四名在视频描述任务上也有改善。病情较轻的患者在对口头指令的理解方面也有所提高。重度语义性痴呆患者在将训练过的单词与图片匹配方面有进步。正如预期的那样，未训练的项目没有发现进步。
有明确证据表明存在泛化现象，尤其是在语义损伤较轻的患者中。未来的研究应调查这种训练在其他形式痴呆症中的效用。
