Broca’s aphasia: symptoms and causes of this disorder

This is one of the language disorders that cause problems when speaking or writing.

Since the brain controls or supervises a large part of the functions of our organism, damage to different regions of this structure can cause a wide variety of disorders. Aphasia is a type of linguistic disorder that occurs as a result of lesions in the brain areas related to language.

In this article we will describe the symptoms and causes of Broca's aphasiaexpressive, motor or production aphasia. This neuropsychological disorder consists of the alteration of expressive language as a consequence of frontal lobe damage, although auditory comprehension is not necessarily affected, as in other types of aphasia.

What is aphasia?

Aphasias are language disorders that occur as a result of lesions in certain regions of the brain, mainly due to traumatic brain injury and stroke, also called infarction or stroke. in certain regions of the brain, mainly due to cranioencephalic trauma and cerebrovascular accidents, also called infarcts or strokes. The term is based on classical Greek and translates as "inability to speak".

There are different types of aphasia characterized by idiosyncratic combinations of impairments in four linguistic domains: verbal comprehension, oral expression, functional communication and literacy.. Most of them share the presence of anomia, which consists of persistent difficulty in retrieving words from memory.

Other common signs and symptoms of aphasia are articulatory and comprehension deficits, reduced spontaneous speech, inability to read and/or write, dysprosody (alterations in the pitch and rhythm of speech) and the use of neologisms (in psychopathology, words that have meaning only to the speaker).

Therefore aphasias not only affect spoken language, but also written language and mimicry, including sign language.including sign language. This is because all these forms of communication depend on the same cognitive functions, related to brain structures and pathways that are damaged in aphasia.

Symptoms and signs of Broca's aphasia.

The basic signs of Broca's aphasia relate to speech production. People with this syndrome have severe difficulty finding words and articulating sentences fluently, and prosody of speech is also affected, resulting in monotonous speech. and the prosody of speech is also affected, resulting in monotonous speech. Writing is also affected.

In the context of this disorder is often referred to as "telegraphic speech" to to refer to the way in which sufferers express themselves: they pause a lot because they have great difficulty articulating (or gesticulating) words that are not content words, i.e. they communicate mainly by successions of nouns and verbs.

The intensity of these symptoms depends on the severity of the lesion; while in some cases only mild anomia, moderate reductions in expressive fluency and the "foreign accent" phenomenon appear, in others the person may be unable to utter any words at all. In most cases at least the most formulaic expressions are retained.

Since the regions associated with Broca's aphasia are involved in motor skills, it is not surprising that the brain lesions that cause it also cause motor signs. These include hemiparesis (paralysis of one half of the body), apraxia (deficits in purposeful movements) and dysarthria, which affects motor function. dysarthria, which affects pronunciation..

In summary, we can say that the main characteristics of Broca's aphasia are the following:

• Lack of fluency of spontaneous language.
• Alterations in writing
• Maintenance of listening and reading comprehension
• Deficits in word repetition
• Problems in remembering words, such as names of objects (anomia).
• Associated motor disturbances (dysarthria, apraxia, hemiparesis)

Causes of this disorder

Broca's aphasia appears as a consequence of lesions in the anterior part of the brain, mainly in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere, which plays a more relevant role than the right one in the execution of movements, including those necessary for speech and writing.

Although the name of the disorder is associated with Brodmann's area 44, known as Broca's areaAlthough the name of the disorder is associated with Brodmann's area 44, known as "Broca's area", damage limited to this brain region causes only mild linguistic and motor symptoms. The most severe manifestations appear when the lesion extends to surrounding areas, such as the anterior insula, the precentral gyrus and the opercular region.

The most common cause of Broca's aphasia is ischemic stroke, which involves the interruption of Blood flow, and therefore oxygen, to a particular area of the brain. In this case the regions affected by oxygen hypoperfusion are those mentioned in the previous paragraph.

With certain frequency the cerebral lesions that cause this type of aphasia are due to other reasons; the most frequent ones are the following cranioencephalic trauma, cerebral hemorrhages, cerebral tumors locatedbrain tumors located near the language areas and extradural hematomas (accumulations of blood or other fluids between the meninges and the skull).