Anomia: Description, Causes, Symptoms And Treatment
“What was it like… that thing we use to eat soups or creams, so round at the tip?” The word that comes to mind for most people is “spoon.”
It is a name, a label that refers to a certain concept that the person who asked the question knows, but cannot access. And although it is generally a momentary lapse, sometimes we are faced with a frequent event in which the individual does not remember the name of things. This is a language disorder called anomia
The concept of anomie refers to the presence of difficulties in naming an object or concept, that is, to access or produce the name or label with which we designate it. It is a problem that can appear in many circumstances, in some cases it is normal, such as occurs during a lapse or during aging, while in others it can be a symptom of a more or less important alteration. The difficulty is mainly found in the use of nouns, with problems with verbs, adjectives or adverbs being more rare.
In general, the person with anomia tends to use circumlocutions to make the recipient of his message understand what he intends to say, using, for example, semantic keys such as what the object in question is used for, its shape or what happens during said situation or phenomenon. . It is also common to use fillers and expressions to save time, or more general categories that include the concept with which they have difficulties (if they are not able to access the name “dog” they can say, for example, “animal”).
Patients and subjects who frequently present anomia usually experience it with discomfort or even concern since most of them are fully aware of what they want to say despite not finding a way to represent it.
Types of anomie
Although anomie tends to be considered as a whole, the truth is that there are several aspects that can cause a specific name to not be remembered or given. Three main types of anomie stand out.
1. Lexical anomie
The purest and most well-known form of anemia occurs when The element that fails is the possibility of accessing the word despite clearly knowing what it refers to It’s not that I don’t know how to pronounce the word or what concept it refers to, but that I don’t know how to represent the label itself in my mind. This is the type of anomie corresponding to the example in the introduction.
2. Phonological anomia
This type of anomie occurs when, despite knowing what concept you want to refer to and what its name is,, the subject is not able to find its representation at a phonetic level, not knowing what to say to name it. It is common in aphasias in which language production is altered, such as Broca’s.
3. Semantic anomie
The problem in this type of anomie occurs when conceptualizing, with cognitive and memory problems It’s not that he couldn’t pronounce the words or that he couldn’t come up with the right label for a concept, but that he couldn’t identify it.
Anomia in aphasias
Anomia is a common symptom present in many aphasias, those alterations and losses in the ability to produce and/or understand language caused by brain injury.
However, although it is generally one of the many symptoms that occur in different types of aphasia, if it appears without other language alterations it may constitute so-called anomic aphasia. This type of aphasia is characterized because the person’s language is fluent, there are no difficulties in understanding the language and if he is asked to repeat the same words he does so without difficulty. Thus the only perceptible alteration is anomie.
Anomic aphasia also corresponds to the semantic aphasia of 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, also presenting other problems such as difficulty 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 or she wants to use. He knows what it is but not how it is said, also presenting problems when storing and replicating series of words.
Contexts and causes of appearance
Anomia can appear in multiple contexts, not all of which are clinical. For example, in the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon there appears a difficulty in remembering a word, although the problem is more one of memory than of language (we would be facing a case of lexical anomie). Likewise, with age it is common to suffer a certain degree of anomia due to the aging of the brain.
At a clinical level, anomia can appear in a large number of mental and organic disorders. The presence of lesions in different areas of the brain linked to language is especially relevant. 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 found in the formulation or choice of the concept, there is also great influence from the frontal lobe.
These injuries and alterations are common in traumatic brain injuries and strokes Its appearance is also very common in dementias, such as Alzheimer’s 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 largely on where the problem is located. In any case, rehabilitation tends to be required from a multidisciplinary perspective, in which the role of language therapy through the use of speech therapy will stand out. In other cases, especially those resulting from dementia, occupational therapy can be very useful.
Among the activities to be applied, the use of matching tasks between drawings and words or tasks in which they must judge whether various words are synonymous or not in cases of semantic anomie, and in the case of pure or lexical anomies, using tasks in which can use phonetic clues, as well as priming (first the word is presented and then the drawing of the concept or element), tasks of completing words and/or sentences or rhyme generation. In cases of phonological anomia, reading aloud and imitation and repetition tasks are usually useful
