Quality of life in Primary Progressive Aphasia: characteristics, influences and implications

Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) is an emerging area of speech pathology practice. Despite its cross over with stroke-aphasia and dementia presentations, both fields in which quality of life has been investigated, limited research has investigated quality of life in PPA. This study conducted four health-related quality of life assessments with six individuals with PPA. Health-related quality of life was found to be individual and heterogeneous: some individuals maintained good health-related quality of life despite linguistic impairment, whereas three out of six participants screened positively for depression. Factors noted to influence health-related quality of life, or reported as particularly important to participants, included: maintaining enjoyable activities, financial situation, family and speech pathology support, and time since and reaction to PPA diagnosis. Linguistic and cognitive impairment were not related to health-related quality of life in this study, although the small sample size is noted as a limitation. Those individuals without severe semantic impairment were able to more reliably report on their health-related quality of life. Implications for assessment of quality of life in PPA and multidisciplinary care of people with PPA are discussed -- abstract.