Article

Acquired reading problems caused by brain injury (alexia) are common, either as a
part of an aphasic syndrome, or as an isolated symptom. In pure alexia, reading
is impaired while other language functions, including writing,
are spared. Being
in many ways a simple syndrome, one would think that pure alexia was an easy
target for rehabilitation efforts. We review the literature on rehabilitation of
pure alexia from 1990 to the present, and find that patients differ widely on
several dimensions, such as alexia severity and associated deficits. Many
patients reported to have pure alexia in the reviewed studies, have associated
deficits such as agraphia or aphasia and thus do not strictly conform to the
diagnosis. Few studies report clear and generalisable effects of training, none
report control data, and in many cases the reported findings are not supported by
statistics. We can, however, tentatively conclude that Multiple Oral Re-reading
techniques may have some effect in mild pure alexia where diminished reading
speed is the main problem, while Tacile-Kinesthetic training may improve letter
identification in more severe cases of alexia. There is, however, still a great
need for well-designed and controlled studies of rehabilitation of pure alexia.

Langue : ANGLAIS