Open AccessFrontal Phonological Agraphia and Acalculia with Impaired Verbal Short-Term Memory due to Left Inferior Precentral Gyrus Lesion
Author(s) -
Yasuhisa Sakurai,
Emi Furukawa,
Masanori Kurihara,
Izumi Sugimoto
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
case reports in neurology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.207
H-Index - 15
ISSN - 1662-680X
DOI - 10.1159/000487849
Subject(s) - agraphia , kana , audiology , precentral gyrus , psychology , memory span , medicine , cognitive psychology , working memory , neuroscience , kanji , cognition , dyslexia , linguistics , reading (process) , chinese characters , magnetic resonance imaging , philosophy , radiology
We report a patient with phonological agraphia (selective impairment of kana [Japanese phonetic writing] nonwords) and acalculia (mental arithmetic difficulties) with impaired verbal short-term memory after a cerebral hemorrhage in the opercular part of the left precentral gyrus (Brodmann area 6) and the adjacent postcentral gyrus. The patient showed phonemic paragraphia in five-character kana nonword writing, minimal acalculia, and reduced digit and letter span. Mental arithmetic normalized after 8 months and agraphia recovered to the normal range at 1 year after onset, in parallel with an improvement of the auditory letter span score from 4 to 6 over a period of 14 months and in the digit span score from 6 to 7 over 24 months. These results suggest a close relationship between the recovery of agraphia and acalculia and the improvement of verbal short-term memory. The present case also suggests that the opercular part of the precentral gyrus constitutes the phonological route in writing that conveys phonological information of syllable sequences, and its damage causes phonological agraphia and acalculia with reduced verbal short-term memory.