The golden mean: A systems biology approach to language disorders

Current clinical typologies of language disorders are mostly based on symptomatic criteria. Nonetheless, they often fail to categorize and characterize patients unambiguously, essentially because of the widespread problems of comorbidity and heterogeneity. Likewise, they usually fail to incorporate etiological factors in a distinctive way, particularly, what we have learnt in the last decades about the genetic causes of neurodevelopmental conditions. Ultimately, these shortcomings are expected to impact negatively on therapies and the recovery of patient’s abilities. This paper argues in favour of a systems biology approach to language disorders, which pays attention to the way in which the myriad of the biological factors involved (at the bottom) interact complexly to regulate language development and processing (at the surface). In particular, it argues for a classification of disorders based on intermediate-level components, like brain oscillations. This fresh approach to the etiopathogenesis of language disorders, which is more biologically motivated and more theoretically grounded, should allow identify robust endophenotypes of language disorders that can be used as reliable hallmarks for an earlier and more accurate diagnosis.