A Comprehensive Overview of Broca’s Aphasia after Ischemic Stroke

Abstract

Aphasia denotes an acquired central disorder of language, which alters patient’s ability of understanding and/or producing spoken and written language. The main cause of aphasia is represented by ischemic stroke. The language disturbances are frequently combined into aphasic syndromes, contained in different vascular syndromes, which may suffer evolution/involution in the acute stage of ischemic stroke. The main determining factor of the vascular aphasia’s form is the infarct location. Broca’s aphasia is a non-fluent aphasia, comprising a wide range of symptoms (articulatory disturbances, paraphasias, agrammatism, anomia, and discrete comprehension disorders of spoken and written language) and is considered the third most common form of acute vascular aphasia, after global and Wernicke’s aphasia. It is caused by a lesion situated in the dominant cerebral hemisphere (the left one in right-handed persons), in those cortical regions vascularized by the superior division of the left middle cerebral artery (Broca’s area, the rolandic operculum, the insular cortex, subjacent white matter, centrum semiovale, the caudate nucleus head, the putamen, and the periventricular areas). The role of this chapter is to present the most important acquirements in the field of language and neurologic examination, diagnosis, and therapy of the patient with Broca’s aphasia secondary to ischemic stroke.