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People with a rare dementia that initially attacks the language center of the brain recruit other areas of the brain to decipher sentences, according to new research led by a University of Arizona cognitive scientist.
The study is one of the first to show that people with a neurodegenerative disease can call upon intact areas of the brain for help. People who have had strokes or traumatic brain injuries sometimes use additional regions of the brain to accomplish tasks that were handled by the now-injured part of the brain.
"We were able to identify regions of the brain that allowed the patients to compensate for the dying of neurons in the brain," said first author Aneta Kielar, a UA assistant professor of speech, language and hearing sciences and of cognitive science.
The type of the dementia the researchers tested, primary progressive aphasia, or PPA, is unusual because it starts by making it hard for people to process language, rather than initially harming people's memory.
Kielar and her colleagues used magnetoencephalography, or MEG, to track how the 28 study participants' brains responded when confronted with several different language tasks. MEG revealed which part of the participant's brain responded and how fast the person's brain responded to the task.
People typically rely on the left side of the brain to comprehend language. Some of the people with PPA who were tested showed additional brain activity on the right, and those people did better on the language tests.
Senior author Jed Meltzer said, "These findings offer hope since it demonstrates that despite the brain's degeneration during PPA, the brain naturally adapts to try and preserve function."
Meltzer, a scientist at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Health Sciences Toronto, in Ontario, Canada, and Canada Research Chair in Interventional Cognitive Neuroscience, added, "This brain compensation suggests there are opportunities to intervene and offer targeted treatment to those areas."
Kielar conducted the research as a part of a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rotman Research Institute.
Kielar's and Meltzer's co-authors on the paper, "Abnormal language-related oscillatory responses in primary progressive aphasia," are Regina Jokel and Tiffany Deschamps of the University of Toronto. The journal NeuroImage: Clinical published the paper online in March.
The Ontario Brain Institute, the Alzheimer's Association, the Ontario Research Coalition and the Sandra A. Rotman program in Cognitive Neuroscience funded the research.
