Are there lifestyle factors that increase the chance of getting aphasia?

Mendez said that research, to date, has not identified any environmental risk factors for these disorders that are "on the spectrum of frontotemporal dementia," i.e. disorders involving the degeneration of the frontal and anterior temporal lobes, where the areas that affect language are located.

"What turns on that process, we know in about 15 percent [of cases], is a bad gene," he said. "There are three major classes of bad genes that do that, so genetic analysis is important because it can run in families. The genes have been a window to figure out what the mechanism is for these disorders."

But, Mendez stressed, "these are relatively rare disorders, and therefore they have been underdiagnosed, misdiagnosed, missed. There are a lot of things we just don't know."

At the same time, research and clinical trials continue to get at the root of this condition in hopes of getting a handle on this currently incurable condition. Because there's no single test to tell you whether you have it, yea or nay, "we're particularly working on biomarkers," he said, referring to the biological indicator of a process (such as aging), event or condition. "There's a mechanism that is revealed by understanding how the gene manifests a disease. We hope that will be a window to finding treatments that attack these mechanisms."