Transcortical Sensory Aphasia after Left Frontal Lobe Infarction: Loss of Functional Connectivity.

BACKGROUND: The underlying mechanism of transcortical sensory aphasia (TSA) caused by lesions occurring in the left frontal lobe remains unclear. We attempted to investigate the mechanism with the use of functional MRI (fMRI).

METHODS: We studied 2 patients with TSA after a left frontal infarction identified by diffusion-weighted MRI. As control subjects, a patient with transcortical motor aphasia and a healthy normal adult were chosen. The Korean version of Western Aphasia Battery was performed initially and at 3 months post stroke. We performed fMRI using verb generation and sentence completion tasks. Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) was also obtained for network-level analysis initially and at 3 months post stroke.

RESULTS: The results of diffusion- and perfusion-weighted MRI revealed no diffusion-perfusion mismatch. Initial fMRI in patients with TSA showed no reversed inter-/intrahemispheric activation patterns. rs-fMRI showed significantly decreased resting-state functional connectivity in the language network in patients with TSA compared with the control subjects. Follow-up rs-fMRI studies showed improvement in functional connectivity along with the recovery of patients' language function.

CONCLUSION: Our data showed that the auditory comprehension deficits in patients with frontal lobe infarcts is attributed to difficulty accessing the posterior language area due to functional disconnection between language centers in the acute stage of stroke.