Agnosia: Meaning, Types, Symptoms, & Treatment in India

What is Agnosia?

Agnosia is a neurological disorder which affects a single information pathway in the brain. This leads to disability in recognition of faces, voices, objects or places. However, people suffering from Agnosia can still interact with the world normally. As mentioned, Agnosia affects a single pathway when brain suffers certain damage. This pathway connects primary sensory areas that store knowledge and information. These primary sensory regions are mainly visual or auditory cortices. Agnosia is caused by lesions on the parietal or occipital lobes of the brain. There are different types of Agnosia, including Environmental Agnosia, Finger Agnosia, Integrative Agnosia and Topographical disorientation.

The primary sensory regions are mainly visual or auditory cortices. Lesions on the parietal or occipital lobes of the brain cause Agnosia. These lobes are vital in storing schematic information and language. Strokes, head traumas, encephalitis, carbon monoxide poisoning, dementia or anoxia generally creates the lesions.

Symptoms

Sometimes, it is difficult to find whether you have the disease or not, but its symptoms dominate the working of your body so much that you come to know its presence. These symptoms include:

Inability to identify people and sounds.
Inability to recognise objects and shapes.
Inability to recognise any familiar smell.

Causes

Some of the most probable causes of this disease are:

Dementia
Carbon monoxide poisoning
Encephalitis
Traumatic brain injuries
Strokes

Risks

The main risk factors include:

Injury of head
Diabetes and obesity
Smoking
Ageing

Prevention

To prevent the occurrence of this disease, one needs to take care of following things:

Avoiding stress and anxiety.
Avoiding smoking.
Maintaining a healthy diet.
Getting regular checkup.

How is it diagnosed?

At Medanta, the clinical diagnosis of the disorder is usually done using two methods:
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Neuropsychological testing
Brain imaging
MRI or CT scan

How is it treated?

Antibiotics
Your doctor might recommend you to take antibiotics to relax the cerebral abscess for sometime and then suggest you to undergo a surgery to drain it completely.
Therapies
Different types of therapies will facilitate to reverse the consequences of brain disorder. In some cases, physiatrist or therapy will improve brain disorder, looking on its aetiology

When do I contact the doctor?

You should immediately see a doctor, when you begin to experience symptoms such as loss of memory or function of brain, extreme headaches or stress. These symptoms will be treated just right with the help of medical and clinical experts and you will be put to absolute health.

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