Cognitive functioning in chronic post-stroke aphasia

ABSTRACT

There is a minimal amount of knowledge regarding the cognitive abilities of people with aphasia. We evaluated the performance of individuals with chronic aphasia (AP) and control participants without aphasia (CP) with left hemisphere stroke in a battery of nonverbal cognitive tests and its relationship with aphasia severity, comprehension abilities, and speech fluency in a prospective cross-sectional study. Cognitive evaluation comprised 10 nonverbal tests. Scores were converted to age and education adjusted standard scores. Forty-eight AP and 32 CP were included. AP average scores were below normal range in three tests: Camel and Cactus Test, immediate recall of 5 Objects Test and Spatial Span. The mean test scores were significantly lower in AP than in CP, except in four tests. Aphasia severity and verbal comprehension ability correlated significantly with semantic memory, constructive abilities and attention/processing speed tests. Subjects with nonfluent aphasia had lower scores than CP in memory, executive functions and attention tests, while subjects with fluent aphasia showed lower scores in memory tests only. On average half of the individuals with aphasia exhibit results within the normal range. Nonetheless, their performance was worse than that of controls, despite the fact that many tests do not correlate with the severity of language disorder.

KEYWORDS:

• Aphasia
• assessment
• cognition
• neuropsychological evaluation
• nonverbal evaluation

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Departamento de Terapia da Fala do Centro de Medicina de Reabilitação do Alcoitão, Unidade de Terapia da Fala do Hospital de Curry Cabral, Unidade de doenças cerebrovasculares (UCV), and Serviço de Medicina Física e de Reabilitação do Hospital de São José e Serviço de Medicina Física e de Reabilitação do Hospital de Santo António dos Capuchos for the referral of patients without which this work would not been done.

Conflicts of interest

All author states that there is no conflict of interest.