Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Mariana Jardim Azambuja
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Medicina (FM/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2006-04-04 |
| Examining board members: |
Leticia Lessa Mansur;
Egberto Reis Barbosa;
Marcia Radanovic
|
| Advisor: | Leticia Lessa Mansur |
| Abstract | |
The objective of this study was to characterize the language alterations in Huntington's disease and how they relate to severity of motor, cognitive, psychiatric disturbances and also with the disease duration. Twenty-six (26) individuals were divided into groups characterized as lightly (11) and moderately ill (15) and compared with two control groups. Alterations in exams of language comprehension and expression were noticed for both groups of sick individuals. The result indicates no evident loss in semantic representation. The language difficulties are related to a global cognitive decline and, principally, to loss of executive functions. The language alterations were significantly correlated to performance in cognitive tasks, but not to the motor or psychiatric alterations of the disease. There was also no correlation observed between the language performance and duration of illness (AU) | |