Dr. Richard Peach: We are going to talk about a particular case to demonstrate what progressive apraxia of speech and aphasia looks like. As you will see, this case is very representative of what you might see in this condition. I think it is a good example for us to use and go through exactly what this particular disorder is about.
How many of you may have already seen cases of primary progressive apraxia of speech and aphasia? This will be a great experience to introduce you to this type of case. For those of you who are in tertiary medical centers, such as myself, these are the kinds of cases that you might see somewhere down the line. Hopefully this will provide you some good background so that you can recognize it when you see it.
Learning Objectives
Our learning objectives are to describe the clinical presentation of progressive apraxia of speech and aphasia in a complex case of neurodegenerative disease, to identify the speech and language characteristics of progressive apraxia of speech and aphasia, and to provide recommendations for the management of the disorder. We will go through some literature to augment what we see in the case I am going to present. We will talk specifically about the recommendations that we made to the patient and the family for this case.
Case Study: Patient M
For our case study, we have patient M. She is a 67-year-old woman who is right-handed. In January 2012, she first reported that she was having the acute onset of a speech disturbance. That was described at the time as slowed speech, but without any real articulation difficulty at that time, and that she was having no problems in terms of her reading and writing. She has a previous medical history of depression. She has had chronic hearing loss. She also is a smoker and at that time, had been smoking about a pack a day for about 40 years. Her social history is that she had completed two years of college. She is a retired office manager and was living with her daughter at the time that she was first seen for this problem.
