The husband of a friend is speaking in garbled ways and a couple of us are wondering if he has some kind of brain disease. When I say garbled, I don’t mean slurred, but more like wandering, rant-y, super-long sentences that don’t have any focus. I don’t have an exact quote, but something like:
“You left the refrigerator door open and accused me of something different from what you claimed that I said you did according to our agreement to stop wasting food and now you blame the appliance malfunction for what you did wrong but I didn’t defend myself…”
The words are English, but the sentence structure is rambling and doesn’t go anywhere… or else it doubles back on itself.
My DIL (of blessed memory) showed erratic behavior over a couple of months and we all made up real-world reasons why she might be doing that, but it turned out she had a glioblastoma multiforme, which was detected by an MRI only after she spent hours driving around and couldn’t find her house.
Yes, this info is sketchy and yes, I’m inviting rank and rampant* speculation. But it’s cold here and I don’t want to take the doggies out for their walk, so I’m telling them I’m working.
My friend’s husband has had MRIs and x-rays and and suffers from vertigo.
This is my actual question: aren’t there things that don’t show up on MRIs and x-rays that could cause this erratic language thing?
Assurance: No malpractice suits will be filed against Dopers who speculate on this.
*Rank & Rampant, Inc. would be a good name for a pornography publishing company.
Sounds a little like Wernicke’s Aphasia. I believe there are many insults to the brain that cause aphasic symptoms but that cannot be detected, or adequately localized, in areas thought to be associated with the symptomatic deficits.
Wernicke’s aphasia can also be called receptive aphasia.
My aunt just had a stroke and her first symptom was receptive aphasia. Her speech is exactly as you describe: fluent, appropriately inflected, just the wrong words. It’s my understanding that a TIA (mini-stroke) can cause the same symptoms but not show up on an MRI.
How old is the affected person? Is this change sudden onset or has it been building gradually? Was he “eccentric” before? Are there any motor changes, e.g. hand tremors, tics, disturbed gait, trouble with balance?
The speech is not quite word salad (Word salad - Wikipedia) but it’s going that way. Perhaps a developing schizophrenia?
Vascular Dementia is caused by reduced blood flow to the brain that isn’t necessarily caused by a specific stroke or hemmorage. It can just be an allover reduction that results from cardiovascular disease, for example.
It looks like there’s a general neurological exam used in diagnosis but no specific imaging that detects it.
My mother had some similar symptoms with some TIAs (“mini-strokes”), as well as speaking nonsense words and just not being able to speak for brief moments as well. It was all pretty subtle, even when I caught her actually in the middle of a TIA and got her to the ER while it was happening. I could tell something was wrong, but she barely scored a blip on the ER’s screening tool, because it can’t score for “she’s not talking like herself”, only for more objective errors apparent to a person who doesn’t know her.
But TIA damage should show up on an MRI.
Any chance there’s an infection anywhere, even something as simple as a UTI? Are his blood sugars stable? People with too low or too high blood sugars sometimes get rambly and drunk sounding.
The guy in question is the husband of a woman I know-- but I don’t know him well at all. He’s 45-ish. Has vertigo. Probably takes some meds, but I don’t know what. He is very touchy and easily angered. A little like Captain Queeg and the strawberries-- overreacts to small things that he interprets as disrespectful. Then he’ll launch one of his rant-y, rambling emails. Mine in the OP was an approximation, not one of his.
I really don’t have enough info to even ask for opinions, not that that has ever stopped anyone on the SDMB from (1)asking for opinions or (2) giving them.
