Agraphia caused by acute right parietal infarction.

Abstract

Injury in the dominant language hemisphere typically leads to agraphia, however we report a patient with agraphia after injury to the right angular gyrus. A 71-year-old Korean woman presented with the complaint of an inability to write for the last 7 days. The patient had been illiterate for most of her life, but had started learning to write Hangul, the Korean alphabet, at a welfare center 3 years ago. On language screening she was unable to write although she could read, and other language functions showed no abnormalities. Brain MRI showed acute infarction in the right angular gyrus. Her writing patterns displayed features of surface agraphia, indicative of phoneme-to-grapheme conversion with phonetic writing of targets. Additionally, she manifested visual errors. A functional MRI indicated that her left hemisphere was language dominant. This patient experienced agraphia resulting from pure impairment of visuo-constructive function after acute infarction in the right angular gyrus.