Rare diseases · Sign or symptom
Aphasia
Difficulty finding words
HP:0002381
What it means
An acquired language impairment of some or all of the abilities to produce or comprehend speech and to read or write.
Aphasia is caused by brain injury. The most common cause is stroke, but aphasia can also be caused by other factors such as head trauma, brain tumors, or infections. The terms aphasia and dysphasia are usually considered to be synonymous, but the word dysphasia has been used inconsistently and it is recommended to no longer use the term dysphasia.
In everyday care
Most people with this sign do not have a rare disease — it appears in common conditions far more often. These general reference pages cover the same topic:
Rare diseases that can present with this63
Very common80–99%
19- 17p11.2microduplication syndrome
- 22q11.2deletion syndrome
- Baraitser-Winter cerebrofrontofacial syndrome
- Behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia
- CK syndrome
- Epidermolysis bullosa simplex with muscular dystrophy
- Familial developmental dysphasia
- Filippi syndrome
- Kleefstra syndrome due to 9q34 microdeletion
- Landau-Kleffner syndrome
- MASA syndrome
- MELAS
- Mietens syndrome
- Nicolaides-Baraitser syndrome
- Oculocerebrorenal syndrome of Lowe
- Pitt-Hopkins syndrome
- Progressive non-fluent aphasia
- Semantic dementia
- X-linked alpha-thalassemia-intellectual disability syndrome
Common30–79%
13- 10q22.3q23.3microduplication syndrome
- Alexander disease
- Childhood-onset motor and cognitive regression syndrome with extrapyramidal movement disorder
- Encephalocraniocutaneous lipomatosis
- Epilepsy with auditory features
- Flynn-Aird syndrome
- Hypertrichosis cubiti
- Primary angiitis of the central nervous system
- Progressive supranuclear palsy
- Progressive supranuclear palsy-corticobasal syndrome
- Syndromic recessive X-linked ichthyosis
- Thumb deformity-alopecia-pigmentation anomaly syndrome
- X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy
Sometimes5–29%
27- Amoebiasis due to free-living amoebae
- Corticobasal syndrome
- Cystinosis
- Developmental and epileptic encephalopathy with spike-wave activation in sleep
- DNM1L-related encephalopathy due to mitochondrial and peroxisomal fission defect
- Early-onset autosomal dominant Alzheimer disease
- Extracranial carotid artery aneurysm
- Familial or sporadic hemiplegic migraine
and 19 more in this range
The range is how often this sign appears among people diagnosed with each disease — it is not a probability of having any of them. Many of these signs also occur in common, non-rare conditions. A sign on this page is a conversation to have with a clinician, not a conclusion.
Part of the broader category
Also called: Losing words · Loss of words
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Start free with EleplanThis page uses the Human Phenotype Ontology (2026-06-23) — Human Phenotype Ontology Consortium, hpo.jax.org. Disease associations from Orphanet (INSERM), CC BY 4.0. Content is educational and is not medical advice.