On Thursday, a representative for Wendy Williams revealed that the TV star had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia and primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Both conditions, Williams’s rep says, have posed “significant hurdles in Wendy’s life,” affecting her ability to communicate and perform cognitive functions.
Williams’s dual diagnosis is similar to the challenges actor Bruce Willis has faced in the past few years. In 2022, Willis’s family announced that the then-67-year-old actor was stepping away from his acting career. “Our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and was recently diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” his daughter Rumer wrote on Instagram. A year later, his family shared that he had also been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia. “While it is painful,” they wrote, “it is a relief to finally have a clear diagnosis.”
Aphasia, which affects an estimated 2 million Americans, is a language disorder that impacts someone’s ability to communicate with others. While Willis’s and Williams’s communication challenges are both linked to dementia, aphasia is associated with a wide scope of brain damage, including strokes, injuries, and illness. Here’s what to know about the condition.
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What is aphasia?
Aphasia is a language disorder that affects a person’s ability to communicate, impairing speech and speech comprehension, reading, and writing. Caused by damage to the brain’s language centers, it impacts the ability to access ideas and thoughts. There’s a wide range of symptoms, all involving some kind of impairment in speaking, comprehension, reading, or writing. People with aphasia might have trouble naming something they already know (this is called “tip of the tongue” phenomenon), mix up sounds in words, misplace or misuse words, invent words, use the same words over and over, or struggle to use numbers or do math.
Aphasia doesn’t necessarily affect all modes of communication. People with mild forms of the disorder may only have trouble retrieving the names of objects or struggle to string words together. In most cases, there’s impairment to multiple channels of communication, but at least some are accessible enough for the person to communicate.
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What causes aphasia?
Willis and Williams both experience aphasia alongside dementia, but the most common cause of the condition is stroke. Brain injuries, brain tumors, infections, or neurodegenerative diseases can also cause aphasia if any part of the brain that processes language is affected.
Aphasia is usually the result of damage to the left side of the brain, where the areas responsible for language are located. Depending on what area of the brain is damaged, aphasia will take different forms, the most common of which are Wernicke’s aphasia and Broca’s aphasia. Wernicke’s aphasia is typically the result of temporal-lobe damage and impacts someone’s ability to connect speech with meaning: They’ll often speak in long, incoherent sentences and are unaware of their mistakes. Broca’s aphasia, caused by frontal-lobe damage, makes it difficult to form words at all. People with Broca’s usually speak in short sentences that make sense but are missing small words like “is” or “and,” and they can understand speech relatively well. Because the frontal lobe also regulates motor movement, people with Broca’s aphasia often experience weakness or paralysis in their right arm or leg.
Depending on the cause, aphasia can develop at different rates. A brain injury or stroke, for example, which disrupts blood flow to the brain, would cause a rapid onset, whereas neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s often involve something called primary progressive aphasia, where someone gradually loses their ability to communicate over time from brain tissue deterioration. Brain infections or tumors also cause a slower onset.
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Can aphasia be treated?
It depends. If there’s a tumor pressing on a particular part of the brain that’s successfully removed, the aphasia often resolves. The same goes for brain infections if they’re treated early. People who’ve suffered brain damage can recover from their symptoms, though if the aphasia lasts longer than two or three months, experts say it’s doubtful they’ll be able to communicate the same way they did before the damage.
In most cases, patients work with a speech and language therapist to help them communicate as effectively as possible. While SLTs can help aphasia patients regain speech, a major part of their treatment is learning to communicate in new ways — using cards with words on them, drawing pictures, relying on facial expressions and gestures, or using apps designed to help them generate speech.
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Is aphasia related to frontotemporal dementia?
Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) is an umbrella term for a group of disorders, including primary progressive aphasia, that involve the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain shrinking in size. Depending on the subtype, FTD symptoms can range from difficulty planning and communicating to inappropriate behavior. FTD patients are often younger than those with Alzheimer’s — most start showing symptoms between the ages of 45 and 64. PPA, which is Williams’s diagnosis, is the only type of aphasia that falls under the FTD umbrella.
