Efficacy of visuo-spatial training in right-brain damaged patients with spatial hemineglect and attention disorders

Several rehabilitative approaches have been used to reduce neglect disorders. Some studies tried to demonstrate that heminealect can be ameliorated by using tasks promoting attentional activation towards the neglected hemispace (Robertson et al., 1995, 2001). As a consequence, a functional link between level of attention and disorders of space exploration has been proposed. For this reason we tried to explore the possible role of attentional deficits on the efficacy of a standard neglect treatment based on visuo spatial rehabilitation. In this study we then examined the performances of a selected group of seven right brain damaged patients, suffering from both severe hemineglect and attentional deficits (of both phasic and tonic components of attention), to several tasks before and after a visuo-spatial training (VST) whose efficacy has been already demonstrated (Pizzamiglio et al., 1992). Results showed that VST induces a significant remission of hemineglect symptoms independently from disorders of attention. Moreover, after visuo-spatial rehabilitation, no improvement of attentional deficits is detectable

An open-label pilot study of the use of rivastigmine to promote functional recovery in patients with unilateral spatial neglect due to first ischemic stroke

The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and safety of rivastigmine as add-on treatment to specific cognitive rehabilitation for unilateral spatial neglect (USN). Twenty patients were randomly assigned either to rehabilitation treatment only (No-RIV) or to rivastigmine (3 mg twice a day, for 8 weeks) add-on treatment (RIV+,). USN and functional status were evaluated by means of specific and validated instruments at baseline, at discharge and at one-month follow up. Compared with the untreated patients, the RIV+ subjects, at discharge, recorded significantly better discharge scores and higher effectiveness on two of the scales. However, subsequent further improvement of the No-RIV patients meant that at follow up there was no significant difference between the two groups. No other statistically significant difference was found. Rivastigmine as add-on treatment to specific cognitive training for USN may improve and accelerate recovery on some specific impairment tests as compared with cognitive training alon

Using the Oxford Cognitive Screen to Detect Cognitive Impairment in Stroke Patients: A Comparison with the Mini-Mental State Examination

BackgroundThe Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS) was recently developed with the aim of describing the cognitive deficits after stroke. The scale consists of 10 tasks encompassing five cognitive domains: attention and executive function, language, memory, number processing, and praxis. OCS was devised to be inclusive and un-confounded by aphasia and neglect. As such, it may have a greater potential to be informative on stroke cognitive deficits of widely used instruments, such as the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) or the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which were originally devised for demented patients.ObjectiveThe present study compared the OCS with the MMSE with regards to their ability to detect cognitive impairments post-stroke. We further aimed to examine performance on the OCS as a function of subtypes of cerebral infarction and clinical severity.Methods325 first stroke patients were consecutively enrolled in the study over a 9-month period. The OCS and MMSE, as well as the Bamford classification and NIHSS, were given according to standard procedures.ResultsAbout a third of patients (35.3%) had a performance lower than the cutoff (<22) on the MMSE, whereas 91.6% were impaired in at least one OCS domain, indicating higher incidences of impairment for the OCS. More than 80% of patients showed an impairment in two or more cognitive domains of the OCS. Using the MMSE as a standard of clinical practice, the comparative sensitivity of OCS was 100%. Out of the 208 patients with normal MMSE performance 180 showed impaired performance in at least one domain of the OCS. The discrepancy between OCS and MMSE was particularly strong for patients with milder strokes. As for subtypes of cerebral infarction, fewer patients demonstrated widespread impairments in the OCS in the Posterior Circulation Infarcts category than in the other categories.ConclusionOverall, the results showed a much higher incidence of cognitive impairment with the OCS than with the MMSE and demonstrated no false negatives for OCS vs MMSE. It is concluded that OCS is a sensitive screen tool for cognitive deficits after stroke. In particular, the OCS detects high incidences of stroke-specific cognitive impairments, not detected by the MMSE, demonstrating the importance of cognitive profiling

Phonological simplifications, apraxia of speech and the interaction between phonological and phonetic processing

Research on aphasia has struggled to identify apraxia of speech (AoS) as an independent deficit affecting a processing level separate from phonological assembly and motor implementation. This is because AoS is characterized by both phonological and phonetic errors and, therefore, can be interpreted as a combination of deficits at the phonological and the motoric level rather than as an independent impairment. We apply novel psycholinguistic analyses to the perceptually phonological errors made by 24 Italian aphasic patients. We show that only patients with relative high rate (>10%) of phonetic errors make sound errors which simplify the phonology of the target. Moreover, simplifications are strongly associated with other variables indicative of articulatory difficulties - such as a predominance of errors on consonants rather than vowels -but not with other measures - such as rate of words reproduced correctly or rates of lexical errors. These results indicate that sound errors cannot arise at a single phonological level because they are different in different patients. Instead, different patterns: (1) provide evidence for separate impairments and the existence of a level of articulatory planning/programming intermediate between phonological selection and motor implementation; (2) validate AoS as an independent impairment at this level, characterized by phonetic errors and phonological simplifications; (3) support the claim that linguistic principles of complexity have an articulatory basis since they only apply in patients with associated articulatory difficulties