Difficulty finding words and repeating long sentences could herald the Alzheimer’s disease. This is the observation made by researchers from the Faculty of Medicine at Université Laval and the Research Center of the CHU de Québec-Université Laval in a study published in the journal Annals of Neurology.
The scientists analyzed 1,251 patients with three forms of aphasia: semantic (difficulty speaking with impaired comprehension), non-fluent (lower verbal flow) and logopenic (difficulty finding and naming certain words and difficulties with repetition). .
The results showed that in case of logopenic aphasia, the beta-amyloid protein level was abnormally high in 86% of patients. However, the accumulation of this protein, at the origin of the formation of amyloid plaques in the brain, is one of the markers of this degenerative disease.
For the other two forms of aphasia, only 20% of patients displayed abnormal beta-amyloid levels.
“People with logopenic aphasia “suffer from a “lack of the word”, they repeatedly block in a sentence, they struggle to find their words and they have difficulty repeating a sentence that has just been said to them”, describes the researcher David Bergeron, one of the authors of the study, taken over by The Canadian Press.
The “language face” of Alzheimer’s
People in their 50s or 60s who suffer from this language disorderwould be more at risk of developing this dementia.
According to the researchers, the disease not only has a “memory face” in reference to memory problemssymptoms of the disease, but also a “language face”. This discovery should help the public to be more attentive to the capacity of expression of those around them and in the event of aphasia of a loved one, to refer it to a doctor.
Read also
A simple risk to predict the risk of dementia
An algorithm to predict Alzheimer’s disease
Alzheimer’s drug to control dreams
