Cognitive Deficits After First-Ever Stroke: A Comparison Between Patients with Regard to Type of Stroke, Hemispheric Lateralization, Gender and Post-Stroke Duration

Objective: In this study we evaluated cognitive functioning of patients with a first-ever stroke. Methods: A sample of 100 stroke patients was compared with a matched control group of 30 Healthy Controls (HC). They were examined with an extensive neuropsychological test battery assessing attention, memory, visuospatial functions, naming and executive functions. Results: For the stroke group in global we detected a significant worse performance for (divided, focused and alternating) attention, visuospatial memory, (phonetic and semantic) verbal fluency and (verbal and non-verbal) abstract reasoning in comparison to the HC group. No significant differences could be found between both groups concerning audioverbal memory, visuospatial functions and naming. The left hemisphere stroke patients showed significant more problemens with verbal cognitive functions (i.e., naming) compared to right hemisphere stroke patients and the right hemisphere stroke patients showed significant more problems with non-verbal cognitive functions (i.e., visuospatial judgement, visuospatial hemi-attention and spatial abstract reasoning) compared to left hemisphere stroke patients. Conclusion: We can conclude that there is a hemispheric lateralization effect on cognitive functioning in our stroke patients. Furthermore, no significant differences in cognitive performance could be documented with regard to infarction versus hemorrhage, cortical infarction versus subcortical infarction, subarachnoid hemorrhage versus intracerebral hemorrhage, female gender versus male gender and post-acute phase versus chronic phase.