title: Neural correlates of spelling difficulties in Alzheimer's disease.
abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is associated with a general cognitive decline that affects the memory and language domains. Thus, an oral production deficit with a lexical-semantic origin has been widely observed in these patients. Their written production capacities, however, have been much less studied. We assessed the spelling abilities of 22 AD patients and a group of matched healthy controls with a test battery including written picture naming and word and pseudoword dictation tests, as well as text dictation and spontaneous writing tasks. The results of the AD patients in the discriminative tasks were then entered into voxel-based morphometry analyses along with their grey matter volumes. The patient group presented a selective impairment for word dictation, which contrasted with a spared capacity to spell pseudowords, and showed more difficulties for words with arbitrary and rule-based orthography. Moreover, they also produced less complete syntactic units in the spontaneous writing task. These results point out the lexical-semantic, as opposed to sublexical, nature of the spelling deficit associated to AD. In addition, we recognized a mainly left-lateralized cortical network, including areas in the posterior inferior temporal lobe and the superior region of the parietal cortex, which might be responsible for this impairment. Other regions, such as the putamen, were also associated to the deficit. The results of this study, hence, improve our understanding of the neuropsychological and neuroanatomical mechanisms that underlie the cognitive symptoms associated to AD.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Psicologia Bàsica and IR3C, Universitat de Barcelona, Psg de la Vall d'Hebron, 171, 08035 Barcelona, Spain. Electronic address: rodriguezferreiro@ub.edu.
authors.forename: Javier
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rodríguez-Ferreiro
authors.affiliation: Hospital de Cabueñes, c/ Los Prados 395, 33203 Gijón, Spain.
authors.forename: Carmen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Martínez
authors.affiliation: Hospital de Cabueñes, c/ Los Prados 395, 33203 Gijón, Spain.
authors.forename: Ana-Julia
authors.initials: AJ
authors.lastname: Pérez-Carbajal
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicología, Universidad de Oviedo, Pza. Feijoo s/n, 33003 Oviedo, Spain.
authors.forename: Fernando
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Cuetos
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000381:Agraphia / Q000209:etiology / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D000544:Alzheimer Disease / Q000150:complications / Q000473:pathology / Q000503:physiopathology; D001284:Atrophy / Q000473:pathology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D010296:Parietal Lobe / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D011699:Putamen / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000473:pathology* / Q000503:physiopathology
keywords: Alzheimer’s disease; Dysgraphia; Spelling; Voxel-based morphometry; Writing