Biología del lenguaje desde la afasia post ataque cerebrovascular: reporte de tres casos y revisión de tema

Language, a person?s ability to communicate and interact with his or her peers, is determined by a complex set of neural networks initially described as being only of cortical order, and currently described as being of cortical-subcortical order, which are interrelated. Its functionality is often affected by multiple etiologies. The main cause of acquired aphasia is stroke. The objective was to document and describe altered lan- guage cortical-subcortical circuits in patients with post-stroke aphasia using the report of three cases and a topical review on neurological language networks. All three studied patients suffered a stroke in areas irrigated by the left middle cerebral artery, with injury of several cortical and subcortical structures. In all patients, damage was found in areas other than Broca and Wernicke, where predominant alterations occurred in the dorsal language network. Patients reported vascular damage focused on the dorsal language network in the dominant hemisphere, compromising cortical and subcortical structures simultaneously, which is related to the complexity of structures, networks, and mecha- nisms involved in human language. The language structures include the insula, caudate, mesial temporal region, in addition to the classic left perisylvian areas, which produce language in a global and interconnected manner through cortical processing networks.