Gerstmann syndrome is a rare neurological disease. It is known for its most important feature: the patient’s inability to recognize his own fingers. However, beyond this symptom, is it a much more complex and acquired disease?All symptoms appear after an injury.
Its name comes from Josef Gerstmann, a young assistant in the Department of Neurology at the University of Vienna, Austria, who described a number of symptoms in a woman who had suffered a stroke; since then, the disease composed of agrafia, digital agnosia and acalculia took its name.
- First.
- It should be noted that most reported cases are the result of a vascular problem.
- Which appears to be the main cause of a syndrome characterized by the dissolution of morphological knowledge of the hands and the inability to work with them.
- It can then be summarized in:.
In 1930, Gerstmann described the syndrome by studying his patients’ injuries and discovered that most had damage to the dominant parietal lobe, specifically in angular convolution.
In the parietal lobe is penfield’s homoncula, a somatosensory mapping of the body. In the parietal lobe, there is a specific region focused on the fingers.
This area is much larger compared to the rest of the body, due to the importance and number of nerve endings that our hands possess.
This area, especially damaged in Gerstmann syndrome, occupies a back of the parietal lobe and is related to language interpretation, with the designation of a common visual and auditory information code.
In general, patients with this syndrome have a stroke in the middle left cerebral artery, which irrigates angular convolution.
It should be noted that Gerstmann syndrome usually presents incompletely, meaning that the three main symptoms do not necessarily have to be present to make the diagnosis.
In many cases there is no agrafia, and semantic aphasia is common instead, a defect in understanding logical-grammatical structures.
Since this syndrome has long been described, advances in science have tested many of its characteristics. Currently, there are discussions on the organic basis of the syndrome, proposing other areas of the parietal lobe in its etiology.
Most patients have lesions on the left parietal lobe, the dominant hemisphere in most right-handers. Abnormalities occur at the cortical level, i. e. in complex treatment areas.
The main disciplines responsible for diagnosing this syndrome are neurology and neuropsychology, with suspicions often evident when proposing finger recognition tasks.
In neurology, diagnosis begins with exploratory examinations and is confirmed by tomography and MRI to visualize damaged tissue, and neuropsychology is responsible for evaluating and analyzing cognitive abilities impaired by clinical observation.
Treatments are also distributed and differentiated according to the responsible specialist, in short, a combined approach between neurology and psychology is always necessary.
Finally, both treatments should focus on the patient’s functional recovery, with goals that seek optimal functioning and discourage isolation.
Initially, although Gerstmann syndrome is rare in the population, it attracted the attention of researchers and specialists for its characteristics.
The interest is that the proper functioning of the brain also depends on good vascular functioning, so all activities that constitute a risk factor for the circulatory system are also a danger to the nervous system.