How is alexia treated?

Many vision rehabilitation techniques can be tried in the treatment of pure alexia. One technique includes improving letter-by-letter reading. Oral re-reading is another technique that can be used. Oral re-reading can lead to improved accuracy and reading rate.

Can you recover from alexia?

Survivors may experience pure alexia after brain injury, which involves difficulty with reading. This usually occurs when a brain injury affects the posterior left hemisphere of the brain. While learning to read again after brain injury can be challenging, it is possible to improve pure alexia.

Is alexia a disability?

Alexia is a rare condition in which reading comprehension is nonexistent or significantly limited due to brain injury, damage, or trauma. It can be associated with other forms of neurological deficits and is often associated with agraphia, the inability to write.

What damage causes alexia?

Pure alexia is usually caused by an occlusion of distal (posterior) branches of the left posterior cerebral artery. The resultant damage is believed to interrupt the transfer of neural information from the visual cortex to the language cortex.

How is agraphia treated?

The Treatment: Phonological Treatment

Phonological treatment is used to improve sound-to-letter and letter-to-sound correspondence to improve agraphia (difficulty writing) due to aphasia. It targets written expression at the word-level by enhancing phonological processing skills.

Alexia without agraphia

What is phonological alexia?

Phonological alexia and phonological agraphia are impairments of written language processing characterized by disproportionate difficulty in reading and spelling nonwords relative to real words (Beauvois & Dérouesné, 1979; Coltheart, 1996; Roeltgen, Sevush, & Heilman, 1983; Shallice, 1981).

What is alexia and agraphia?

Abstract. Alexia with agraphia is defined as an acquired impairment affecting reading and writing ability. It can be associated with aphasia, but can also occur as an isolated entity.

Is alexia and dyslexia the same?

Alexia, or acquired dyslexia, refers to a deficit in reading following damage to the brain in previously literate individuals. Alexia is different from developmental dyslexia, which is a developmental deficit in learning to read.

How do you treat Alexia without agraphia?

Patients who present with an inability to read with preserved visual acuity should be investigated further for a possibility of this rare phenomenon. Based on the literature review, treatment of alexia without agraphia is accomplished by rehabilitation by multiple oral re-reading techniques [10].

What part of the brain is damaged in alexia?

In pure alexia, damage most often involves the left occipital lobe. This region is primarily concerned with vision in the opposite field of vision, and patients with pure alexia typically – but not always – have lost vision on their right side.

What are the types of alexia?

Four patterns of alexia (or dyslexia) have been recognized: letter-by-letter reading, deep, phonological, and surface dyslexia.

What is alexia SLP?

116: Alexia: an Introduction to Assessment and Treatment with Brett McCardel, MS, CCC-SLP. Alexia is an acquired impairment of reading that can manifest in a variety of reading challenges, ranging anywhere from identifying single letters to reading text-length passages.

What causes pure word blindness?

Pure alexia typically results from a stroke within the distribution of the left posterior cerebral artery or from a tumor located in the posterior left hemisphere of the brain. In most cases, the left occipital lobe is damaged such that the primary visual cortex is destroyed.

Can someone with aphasia learn to read again?

The brain's left hemisphere supports most language functions, including reading, but the right hemisphere does have some normal reading ability. Because of this, a person with a left hemisphere stroke can regain some reading ability via the injured left hemisphere as well as the right hemisphere.

Why can't I read after stroke?

Reading difficulties after a stroke are often referred to as “alexia” or “acquired dyslexia.” When the left side of the brain experiences damage or trauma, it is common for language abilities to suffer due to the fact that most language functions occur in the left hemisphere.

Does reading help with aphasia?

Some people with aphasia can use books read aloud to follow along with a paper copy, but this is usually too difficult and frustrating. There are many different levels of reading, so even if you think your loved one "has no reading", you might be surprised!

What causes pure alexia?

Causes. Pure alexia almost always involves an infarct to the left posterior cerebral artery (which perfuses the splenium of the corpus callosum and left visual cortex, among other things). The resulting deficit will be pure alexia – i.e., the patient can write but cannot read (even what they have just written).

What is mild alexia?

Alexia means the inability to comprehend written material. The patients' ability to write and spell is intact, but they are unable to spontaneously read, even what they have written seconds ago. Other features of language, such as speech comprehension, are usually intact.

Is alexia a type of aphasia?

Abstract. Alexia is an acquired disturbance in reading. Alexias that occur after left hemisphere damage typically result from linguistic deficits and may occur as isolated symptoms or as part of an aphasia syndrome.

What is deep alexia?

Deep Alexia. The defining feature of deep alexia is the production of semantic paralexias when reading aloud. A semantic paralexia is a type of reading error in which the word produced is related in meaning to the written target word.

What is posterior alexia?

Posterior or pure alexia is an uncommon acquired reading disturbance in which the loss of the ability to read is not associated with other language deficits.

What is global alexia?

Global Alexia

term used to indicate total loss of the ability to understand written or printed language. synonymous with central alexia but indicates a total loss.

What does surface dyslexia mean?

Surface dyslexia, first described by Marshall and Newcombe, is a disorder characterized by the relatively preserved ability to read words with regular or predictable grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences but substantially impaired reading of words with “irregular” or exceptional print-to-sound correspondences.

Is dyslexia central or peripheral?

Deep dyslexia is considered to be a "central dyslexia" as compared to a "peripheral dyslexia". Peripheral dyslexics have difficulty matching the visual characteristics of letters that comprise a word to a stored memory of this word from prior encounters.

What are the symptoms of alexia?

What are the symptoms of alexia ? Pure or peripheral alexia is characterised by slow and inaccurate reading or by a reading “letter-by- letter” strategy. Central Alexia which is part of a general language disorder characterized by language errors as well as reading disabilities.