La valutazione dei deficit afasici in fase acuta

LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT IN ACUTE APHASIA Acute aphasia asks for a specific assessment due to the need of a bedside examination and of a discrimination of language impairments from the attention and concentration disorders that usually complement an acute brain damage. We describe here a new bedside aphasia examination for the evaluation of acquired language impairments in Italian. The task (Esame del linguaggio al letto del malato: ELLM) is intended for the acute phase of aphasia, usually during the first week post onset. The test is composed of a series of tasks aimed at measuring the linguistic production (spontaneous speech, automatic series, picture naming, description of a complex image, repetition, reading aloud and spelling) and oral comprehension of an acute brain damaged patient. The examination takes about 20 minutes. Norms for the test use were derived from a sample of 50 healthy participants and 56 patients suffering from different types of language impairment and from different severity. The description of a clinical case clarifies the diagnostic procedure with the ELLM