Anomia: description, causes, symptoms and treatment

"What was it like... what we use to eat soups or creams, so round at the tip?" The word that comes to mind for most people is “spoon”.

It is a name, a label that refers to a certain concept that the person who asked the question knows, but cannot access. And although it is generally a momentary lapse, sometimes we are facing a frequent event in which the individual does not remember the name of things. This is a language disorder called anomia..

Anomia: description and symptoms

The concept of anomie refers to the presence of difficulties in naming an object or concept., that is, to access or produce the name or label with which we designate it. It is a problem that can appear in many circumstances, being in some cases something normal as it happens before a lapses or during aging while in others it may be a symptom of a more or less important disorder. The difficulty is mainly in the use of nouns, being more infrequent that there are problems with verbs, adjectives or adverbs.

In general, the person with anomia tends to use circumlocutions to make the receiver of his message understand what he intends to say, using, for example, semantic clues such as what the object in question is used for, its shape or what happens during said situation or freak. It is also common to use fillers and expressions to save time, or more general categories that include the concept with which they have difficulties (if they are not able to access the name "dog" they can say for example "animal").

Patients and subjects who frequently present anomia tend to experience it with discomfort or even with concern., since most of them are fully aware of what they mean despite not finding a way to represent it.

types of anomie

Although anomie tends to be considered as a whole, the truth is that there are several aspects that can cause a specific name to not be remembered or cannot be issued. Three major types of anomie stand out.

1. Lexical anomie

The purest and most well-known form of anemia occurs when the element that fails is the possibility of accessing the word despite clearly knowing what it refers to. It's not that I don't know how to pronounce the word or what concept it refers to, but that I don't know how to represent the label itself in my mind. This is the type of anomie corresponding to the example in the introduction.

2. Phonological anomie

This type of anomie occurs when, despite knowing what concept he wants to refer to and what his name is, the subject is not able to find its representation at a phonetic level, not knowing what to say to name it. It is frequent in aphasias in which the production of language is altered, as in Broca's.

3. semantic anomie

The problem in this type of anomie occurs when it comes to conceptualizing, with cognitive and memory problems.. It's not that he couldn't pronounce the words or that he couldn't find the proper label for a concept, but that he can't identify it.

Anomia in aphasias

Anomia is a common symptom present in many aphasias, those alterations and loss of the ability to produce and/or understand language caused by brain injury.

However, although it is usually one of the many symptoms that occur in the different types of aphasia, if it appears without other language alterations it can constitute the so-called aphasia anomic. This type of aphasia is characterized by the fact that the person's language is fluent., there are no difficulties in understanding the language and if he is asked to repeat the same words, he does so without difficulty. Thus, the only perceptible alteration is anomie.

Anomic aphasia also corresponds to the semantic aphasia of the classification proposed by Luria, although there are nuances that separate them. In this case, the ability to name and find the word in question is altered because the subject is not able to choose between different options, also presenting other problems such as the difficulty in understanding complex relationships at the logical.

Another type of aphasia especially linked to anomie is acoustic-amnesic semantic aphasia, in which the subject does not remember the phonetic form of the word in question that he wants to use. He knows what it is but not how it is said, also presenting problems when it comes to storing and replicating series of words.

Contexts and causes of appearance

Anomia can appear in multiple contexts, not all of which are clinical. For example, in the tip of the tongue phenomenon there is a difficulty in remembering a word, although the problem is more one of memory than of language (we would be facing a case of lexical anomie). Likewise, with age it is common to suffer a certain degree of anomie due to the aging of the body. brain

At the clinical level, anomie can appear in a large number of mental and organic disorders. The presence of lesions in different areas of the brain linked to language is especially relevant. The most related to anomia are Broca's areas 37 to 39 (including the angular gyrus) and other tertiary association areas of the parieto-temporo-occipital zone. Likewise, if the problem is found in the formulation or choice of the concept, there is also a great influence of the frontal lobe.

These injuries and alterations are common in head injuries and cerebrovascular accidents.. Its appearance is also very frequent in dementias, such as Alzheimer's or some frontotemporal disorders such as semantic dementia.

Treatment

In cases where it is not a slight lapse but a truly anomic subject, the treatment to apply will depend to a large extent on where the problem is located. In any case, rehabilitation tends to be required from a multidisciplinary perspective, in which the role of speech therapy through the use of speech therapy will be highlighted. In other cases, especially those derived from dementia, occupational therapy can be very useful.

Among the activities to be applied, the use of matching tasks between pictures and words or tasks in which they have to judge whether different words are synonymous or not in cases of semantic anomia, and in the case of pure or lexical anomies, use tasks in which phonetic clues can be used, as well as priming (first the word is presented and then the drawing of the concept or element), tasks of completing words and/or sentences or generation of rhymes. In cases of phonological anomia, reading aloud and imitation and repetition tasks are usually useful..