Autotopagnosia

[3] Typically, the cause of autotopagnosia is a lesion found in the parietal lobe of the left hemisphere of the brain.

[4] As a concept, autotopagnosia has been criticized as nonspecific; some claim that this is a manifestation of a greater symptomatic complex of anomia, marked by an inability to name things in general—not just parts of the human body.

[3] Patients with "pure" autotopagnosia often have no problems carrying out tasks involved in everyday life that require body part awareness.

Other related disorders include: Due to the subjective nature of autotopagnosia, there are many hypotheses presented as to the underlying causation.

The rarity of autotopagnosia, frequently combined with the manifestation of other psychoneurological disorders, makes the prime cause extremely difficult to study.

[8] Lesions in the left parietal lobe are thought to disrupt one or more of four putative mental representations of body schema.

Originally, it was diagnosed as the effects of general mental deterioration or of aphasia on the task of pointing to body parts on verbal command.

[10] With such a general definition, a patient that presents with a dysfunction of or failure in accessing one of four mental representation systems has autotopagnosia.

At the start of each trial, the examiner ensures that the subject's hands are at rest on the arms of the chair and legs uncrossed.

[11] As autotopagnosia arises from neurological and irreversible damage, options regarding symptom reversal or control are limited.

There have been cases in which extensive rehabilitation has been beneficial following restitution, repetitive training to correct the impaired function, and compensation of other skills to make up for the deficit.

Rehabilitation is not a definitive treatment and only shows signs of slight improvement in a small percentage of autotopagnosia patients.