[1] Individuals who have pure alexia have severe reading problems while other language-related skills such as naming, oral repetition, auditory comprehension or writing are typically intact.
Pure alexia results from cerebral lesions in circumscribed brain regions and therefore belongs to the group of acquired reading disorders, alexia,[1] as opposed to developmental dyslexia found in children who have difficulties in learning to read.
Anything that stops proper blood flow to the area necessary for normal reading abilities will cause a form of alexia.
In cases of pure alexia, locations are found in the section of the brain, specifically the temporo-occipital area.
Analysis of diffusion images showed that the visual word form area (VWFA) is connected to the occipital lobe via the inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF), a projection that runs between the temporal and occipital lobe.
Thus, the proposed pathophysiological mechanism is that the ILF lesion interferes with transmission of visual information to the VWFA.
[17] There is, however, an alternative view that suggests the "VWFA" is devoted to processing of high acuity foveal input, which is particularly salient for complex visual stimuli like letter strings.
Studies have highlighted disrupted processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli after damage to the left pFG, both for familiar and unfamiliar objects [18][19] Pure alexia exhibits some unexpected residual abilities despite the inability to read words.
For example, the patient would be presented with "8 – 6", and he or she would read it as "five minus four", but still come up with the correct answer "two" with greater than chance accuracy.
[citation needed] Though there have been ample attempts to rehabilitate patients with pure alexia, few have proven to be effective on a large scale.
At the simplest level, patients seeking rehabilitation are asked to practice reading words aloud repeatedly.
The treatment aims to shift patients away from the LBL reading strategy by strengthening links between visual input and the associated orthographic representations.
This will hopefully aid in word recognition and promote interactive processing of all available information to support reading.