Association between Aphasia and Acalculia: Analytical Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

Acalculia in aphasic patients should be better investigated in order to understand if it is a simple comorbid or if it is influenced by language disorders. This study aimed to compare the performance on EC301 battery calculation tasks between aphasic and normal subjects and sought to verify a possible association between number processing and calculation skills and linguistic changes in aphasic patients, in order to investigate if language disorders interfere with number processing and calculation. Analytical cross-sectional study with a control group, performed of the Department of Speech and Hearing Disorders of a public university, conducted in the city of S&atildeo Paulo, Brazil. First, to analyze the specific difficulties encountered in numerical processing and calculation tasks among the aphasic group, aphasic and healthy adult’s performance in specific calculation tasks were compared. The calculation tasks, which had been badly performed by aphasic patients, were selected. Aphasic patients were also submitted to the language tasks from Montreal-Toulouse Protocol: oral and written comprehension, repetition, reading aloud, naming and dictation. We observed that aphasic individuals showed changes in numerical processing and calculation tasks that were not observed in the healthy population. The most important finding of this study was that aphasic individuals showed changes in numerical processing and calculation that were positively associated to their linguistic performance. The strong associations between battery EC301 and linguistic tasks suggest that language disorders interfere with number processing and calculation.