Features of language disorders in a person in advanced old age without known comorbid neurological or dementia diseases after undergoing a nervous breakdown

Introduction:
Features of mixed language and communication disorders were described in a woman in advanced old age (82 years) who underwent a nervous breakdown after a random event. Following consent for the study, attempts were made to verify language symptoms indicating forgetfulness of names (anomia), confusion of meanings in terms of designators and actions, and inconsistency of context with the speaker’s intention. The result of the traumatic experience was, on the psychological level, a nervous breakdown. Mutistic features (withdrawal from the act of speaking) were observed, which were not associated with symptoms of motor aphasia. This type of aphasia was ruled out because the patient exhibited good articulatory organs. Sensory features with a prototype of Wernicke’s aphasia were left for evaluation. The respondent had difficulty in distinguishing the meanings of objects; moreover, she did not understand the intent of messages.

Aim of the research:
Evaluation of syntactic-semantic features of language on the example of selected speech samples, and determination of the relationship between the presence of features of sensory-sensory aphasia and mental incident in an elderly person. The person concerned represented the beginning of a pathological process on the neurological and mental levels.

Material and methods:
The study was empirical in nature. Tests for speech motor, pragmatics, and semantics of language were used. An attempt was made to understand intentions based on the situation presented and questions expressed in the conditional mode. In addition, a differential diagnosis of the presented disorders was made using the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) test to assess cognitive activity.

Results:
With normal motor attempts (partial comprehension at the level of imitation), comprehension deficits of a formal-contextual nature were observed at the level of intention and accompanying emotion, such as reactions to a message with different intonation contours. When aphatic features were combined with nervous breakdown, there was an impoverishment of both active and passive vocabulary. The MMSE scale shows a cognitive deficit in the patient.

Conclusions:
Features of disorders of language, speech, and communication can reveal themselves after a neurological incident, mechanical trauma, or a severe psychological experience. In the case of the respondent, there were symptoms of articulatory and semantic fluency, difficulty in programming speech in line with the topic at hand, and withdrawal from the communicative act. Depletion of the passive lexicon appeared due to a nervous breakdown. However, another aetiology cannot be ruled out, including an already ongoing, pathological process of a neurological nature.