Progressive affective aprosodia and prosoplegia.

Abstract

The right frontal lobe is important for the expression of emotional prosody, emotional faces, and automatic speech. The authors describe a woman who presented with progressive expressive affective aprosodia, affective prosoplegia, amusia, and loss of automatic speech but with an intact ability to understand emotional prosody and faces as well as express and understand syntactic prosody. MRI showed predominant right frontal cortical atrophy. The authors suggest that this patient has a form of frontotemporal dementia, analogous to primary progressive aphasia but disrupting right frontal lobe-mediated functions.