What is Alexia and dyslexia?

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.

What is alexia disorder?

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 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 is alexia 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 alexia education?

Alexia is a type of aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness or visual aphasia.

Dyslexia and Alexia - part 1

What causes alexia?

Stroke is the most common cause of acquired alexia, though other forms of neurological disease can also cause alexia. Alexia is associated with lesions that disconnect both visual association cortices from the dominant, language-related temporoparietal cortices.

How is alexia treated?

What part of the brain does alexia affect?

Patients with pure alexia lose the ability to read fluently following injury to areas in the rear part of the left hemisphere of their brain. The curious thing is that they can still walk, talk, think, and even write like they did before their injury. They just can't read. Not even what they have written themselves.

What are the different types of alexia?

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

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.

What is pure dyslexia?

Reading and Acquired Dyslexia

This form of alexia is pure in the sense that patients with the disorder often speak and write normally. Recent work suggests that many patients with this disorder exhibit implicit reading in that they access information about written words of which they are unaware.

What kind of disorder is dyslexia?

Dyslexia is a learning disorder that involves difficulty reading due to problems identifying speech sounds and learning how they relate to letters and words (decoding). Also called reading disability, dyslexia affects areas of the brain that process language.

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 is phonetic dyslexia?

Children with phonological dyslexia (also called auditory dyslexia) have trouble with phonological and/or phonemic awareness. Phonemic and phonological awareness are the skills that allow us to read. “Phonological awareness lets kids recognize and work with the sounds of spoken language….

How many different forms of dyslexia are there?

The 4 types of dyslexia include phonological dyslexia, surface dyslexia, rapid naming deficit, and double deficit dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning disorder where the person often has difficulty reading and interpreting what they read.

What part of the brain causes apraxia?

Apraxia results from dysfunction of the cerebral hemispheres of the brain, especially the parietal lobe, and can arise from many diseases or damage to the brain. There are several kinds of apraxia, which may occur alone or together.

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.

Can dyslexia be caused by a head injury?

In acquired dyslexia, the person's brain had developed the ability to function in a typical way, but some sort of event, such as an illness or head injury, has caused damage to the brain that impairs that function.

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.

How can I increase my alexia?

The Treatment: Multiple Oral Re-Reading (MOR)

Developed as a treatment for pure alexia, multiple oral re-reading (MOR) has shown promising results for many people with varying types of alexia.

What causes locked in syndrome?

Locked-in syndrome is caused by damaged to the pons, a part of the brainstem that contains nerve fibers that relay information to other areas of the brain. The first description of the locked-in syndrome can be found in The Count of Monte Cristo authored by Alexandre Dumas.

What is surface alexia?

Surface dyslexia is a type of dyslexia, or reading disorder. According to Marshall & Newcombe's (1973) and McCarthy & Warrington's study (1990), patients with this kind of disorder cannot recognize a word as a whole due to the damage of the left parietal or temporal lobe.

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 central alexia?

Central alexia (CA; also known as alexia with agraphia; Dejerine, 1891) is a reading disorder that occurs within the context of a generalized language disorder (aphasia). Patients with CA find reading slow and effortful and make frequent errors (Leff and Starrfelt, 2013).

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].