Anomia: description, causes, symptoms and treatment

This language disorder causes us to be unable to remember the name of things.

"What was it like...that thing we use to eat soups or creams, so round at the end?" The word that comes to most people's minds is "spoon."

It's a name, a label that refers to a particular concept that the person who asked the question knows about, but can't access. And while this is usually a momentary lapse, sometimes we are dealing with a frequent occurrence in which the individual does not remember the name of things. This is a language disorder called anomia..

Anomia: description and symptoms

The concept of anomia refers to the presence of difficulties in naming an object or concept, i.e., in accessing or producing a name.that is to say, to access or produce the name or label with which we designate it. It is a problem that can appear in many circumstances, being in some cases something normal as it occurs in a slip of the tongue or during aging, while in others it can be a symptom of a more or less important alteration. The difficulty is found mainly in the use of nouns, being more infrequent that there are problems with verbs, adjectives or adverbs.

In general, the person with anomia tends to use circumlocutions to make the receiver of his message understand what he intends to say, using for example semantic clues such as what the object in question is used for, its shape or what happens during that situation or phenomenon. It is also common to use crutches and expressions to gain time, or more general categories that include the concept with which they have difficulty (if they are unable to access the name "dog" they may say for example "animal").

Patients and subjects who frequently present anomia tend to experience it with discomfort or even with concernMost of them are fully aware of what they mean even though they cannot find a way to represent it.

Types of anomia

Although anomia tends to be considered as a whole, the truth is that there are several aspects that can cause the inability to remember or to utter a specific name. Three main types of anomia stand out.

Lexical anomia

The purest and best known form of anemia, it occurs when the element that fails is the ability to access the word despite knowing clearly what it refers to.. It is not that you do not know how to pronounce the word or what concept it refers to, but that you do not know how to represent the label itself in your mind. This is the type of anomia corresponding to the example in the introduction.

2. Phonological anomia

This type of anomia occurs when, despite knowing what concept he/she wants to refer to and what its name is, the subject is not able to find its representation at the phonetic level, not knowing what to say to name it.the subject is not able to find its representation at the phonetic level, not knowing what to say to name it. It is frequent in aphasias in which language production is altered, as in Broca's aphasia.

3. Semantic anomia

The problem in this type of anomia occurs at the time of conceptualization, with cognitive and memoristic problems.. It is not that he could not pronounce the words or that he does not find the appropriate label for a concept, but that he is not able to identify it.

Anomia in aphasia

Anomia is a common symptom present in many aphasias, those alterations and losses of the ability to produce and/or understand language caused by brain damage.

However, although it is usually one of the multiple symptoms that occur in the different types of aphasia, if it appears without other language disorders, it may constitute the so-called anomic aphasia. This type of aphasia is characterized by the fact that the person's language is fluent.There are no difficulties in understanding the language and if asked to repeat the same words, he/she does so without difficulty. Thus, the only perceptible alteration is anomia.

Anomic aphasia also corresponds to semantic aphasia in the classification proposed by Luria, although there are nuances that separate them. In this case the ability to name and find the word in question is altered because the subject is not able to choose between different options, presenting also other problems such as difficulty in understanding complex relationships at a logical level.

Another type of aphasia especially linked to anomia is acoustic-amnestic semantic aphasia, in which the subject does not remember the phonetic form of the word in question that he wants to use. He knows what it is but not how it is said, presenting also problems in storing and replicating series of words.

Contexts and causes of occurrence

Anomia can appear in multiple contexts, not all of which are clinical. For example, in the tip of the tongue phenomenon, there is a difficulty in remembering a word, although the problem is more of memory than of language (this would be a case of lexical anomia). It is also common with age to suffer a certain degree of anomia due to the aging of the brain.

At the clinical level, anomia can appear in a large number of mental and organic disorders. Of particular relevance is the presence of lesions in different areas of the brain related to language. The most related to anomia are Broca's areas 37 to 39 (including the angular gyrus) and other tertiary association areas of the parieto-temporo-occipital area. Likewise, if the problem is in the formulation or choice of the concept, there is also great influence of the frontal lobe.

These lesions and alterations are frequent in cranioencephalic trauma and cerebrovascular accidents.. It is also very frequent in dementias, such as Alzheimer's disease or some frontotemporal dementias such as semantic dementia.

Treatment

In cases where it is not a slight lapse but a truly anomic subject, the treatment to be applied will depend on the type of dementia.The treatment to be applied will depend to a great extent on where the problem lies. In any case, rehabilitation tends to be required from a multidisciplinary perspective, in which the role of speech therapy through the use of speech therapy will stand out. In other cases, especially in those derived from dementia, occupational therapy can be very useful.

Among the activities to be applied, the use of matching tasks between pictures and words or tasks in which they must judge whether or not several words are synonymous in cases of semantic anomia have proven to be successful, and in the case of pure or lexical anomias use tasks in which phonetic clues can be used, as well as priming (first the word is presented and then the drawing of the concept or element), tasks to complete words and/or sentences or generation of rhymes. In cases of phonological anomia, reading aloud and imitation and repetition tasks are often useful..