Transdiagnostic approach to language and cognition in the logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia and Alzheimer’s disease
type: CreativeWork
description: Language is commonly affected in many dementias as a dominant or adjunctive symptom. Speech and/or language deficits are the primary symptom in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), associated with frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Language deficits are also frequently found in other dementias like typical, amnestic AD. Progressive language deterioration negatively affects individuals’ quality of life, carer burden, and outcome. Enabling early and accurate diagnosis is a priority for inclusion in clinical trials and targeted speech-language interventions. In my thesis, I discuss barriers to the assessment of progressive aphasias and present exemplars of transdiagnostic approaches to improve clinical characterisation of language-based dementias. The clinical motivation behind Chapter 2 was the wide use of picture description tasks across disciplines but the lack of a validated tool to base the interpretation on, further deeming this otherwise clinically valuable task impractical for non-specialist settings. Using data-driven methods, I developed a novel aphasia checklist designed to be simple and sensitive in detecting a primary or associated language impairment with a one-minute speech sample. In addition to finding excellent within-sample four-fold cross-validation, I mitigated the potential limitation of a small sample size (n = 74) by conducting predictive validity testing on an unseen dataset (n = 33). This level of validation is not typically done for patients with rare diseases like PPA, PSP and CBS, and my current models have the potential to further generate specific word checklists for other picture description tasks, different languages, and diverse patient groups. In Chapter 3 to 5, I posed three key unanswered questions that challenge our current assumptions and understanding about the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA), also known as the “language-variant AD”: (1) If people with lvPPA have semantic deficits, what is the nature o…
abstract: Language is commonly affected in many dementias as a dominant or adjunctive symptom. Speech and/or language deficits are the primary symptom in primary progressive aphasia (PPA), associated with frontotemporal lobar degeneration and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Language deficits are also frequently found in other dementias like typical, amnestic AD. Progressive language deterioration negatively affects individuals’ quality of life, carer burden, and outcome. Enabling early and accurate diagnosis is a priority for inclusion in clinical trials and targeted speech-language interventions. In my thesis, I discuss barriers to the assessment of progressive aphasias and present exemplars of transdiagnostic approaches to improve clinical characterisation of language-based dementias. The clinical motivation behind Chapter 2 was the wide use of picture description tasks across disciplines but the lack of a validated tool to base the interpretation on, further deeming this otherwise clinically valuable task impractical for non-specialist settings. Using data-driven methods, I developed a novel aphasia checklist designed to be simple and sensitive in detecting a primary or associated language impairment with a one-minute speech sample. In addition to finding excellent within-sample four-fold cross-validation, I mitigated the potential limitation of a small sample size (n = 74) by conducting predictive validity testing on an unseen dataset (n = 33). This level of validation is not typically done for patients with rare diseases like PPA, PSP and CBS, and my current models have the potential to further generate specific word checklists for other picture description tasks, different languages, and diverse patient groups. In Chapter 3 to 5, I posed three key unanswered questions that challenge our current assumptions and understanding about the logopenic variant of PPA (lvPPA), also known as the “language-variant AD”: (1) If people with lvPPA have semantic deficits, what is the nature o…
author: Henderson, Shalom
language: eng
keywords: logopenic variant of primary progressive aphasia, primary progressive aphasia, Alzheimer's disease, language and cognition, neuropsychology, frontotemporal lobar degeneration
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/f1fe4144-ba11-41be-b1e9-426d15d21c90/download
license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
date published: 2024-09-25
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:13Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.114456