Broca’s Aphasia: Symptoms And Causes Of This Disorder
Since the brain controls or supervises a large part of our body’s functions, damage to different regions of this structure can cause very varied alterations. Aphasias are 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 Symptoms and causes of Broca’s aphasia , expressive, motor or production. This neuropsychological disorder consists of the alteration of expressive language as a result of damage to the frontal lobe, although auditory comprehension is not necessarily affected, as occurs in other types of aphasia.
Aphasias are language disorders that appear due to injuries in certain regions of the brain, mainly due to head trauma and cerebrovascular accidents, also called heart attacks or strokes. The term is based on classical Greek and translates as “inability to speak.”
There are different types of aphasia that are characterized by idiosyncratic combinations of alterations in four linguistic domains: verbal comprehension, oral expression, functional communication and reading and writing. 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, reduction in spontaneous language, inability to read and/or write, dysprosody (alterations in the tone and rhythm of speech) and the use of neologisms (in psychopathology, words that only have meaning to the person who says them).
Therefore the aphasias They do not only affect spoken language, but also written language and mimicry , 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.
The basic signs of Broca’s aphasia are related to speech production. People with this syndrome have severe difficulties finding words and articulating sentences fluently, and the prosody of the speech is also affected, which causes the speech to be monotonous. Writing is equally affected.
In the context of this disorder It is frequently referred to as “telegraphic speech.” to refer to the way of expressing themselves of those who suffer from it: they pause many times because they have many difficulties articulating (or gesturing) words that are not content, that is, they communicate mainly through sequences of nouns and verbs.
The intensity of these symptoms depends on the severity of the injury; 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. In most cases at least the most formulaic expressions are retained.
Since the regions related to Broca’s aphasia are involved in motor skills, it is not surprising that the brain lesions that cause it also cause motor signs. Highlights include hemiparesis (paralysis in one half of the body), apraxia (deficit in purposeful movements) and dysarthria, which affects pronunciation.
Briefly we can say that the main characteristics of Broca’s aphasia are the following:
Causes of this disorder
Broca’s aphasia appears as a consequence of lesions in the anterior part of the brain, especially in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere, which plays a more relevant role than the right in the execution of movements, including those necessary for speech and movement. writing.
Although the name of the disorder is associated with Brodmann 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, precentral gyrus, and opercular region.
The most common cause of Broca’s aphasia is ischemic strokes, which consist of the interruption of blood flow, and therefore oxygen, to a certain area of the brain. In this case, the regions affected by oxygen hypoperfusion are those that we have mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Quite often the brain lesions that cause this type of aphasia are due to other reasons; the most frequent are the traumatic brain injuries, brain hemorrhages brain tumors located near the language areas and extradural hematomas (accumulations of blood or other fluids between the meninges and the skull).
