Publications by authors named "Helena Dresch Vascouto"
Background: Pupil reactivity and the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS) score are the most clinically relevant information to predict the survival of traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients.
Objective: We evaluated the accuracy of the GCS-Pupil score (GCS-P) as a prognostic index to predict hospital mortality in Brazilian patients with severe TBI and compare it with a model combining GCS and pupil response with additional clinical and radiological prognostic factors.
Methods: Data from 1,066 patients with severe TBI from 5 prospective studies were analyzed.
Article Synopsis
- The study aimed to assess cognitive performance one year after hospital discharge in patients with severe traumatic brain injury who had favorable outcomes.
- Out of 163 patients, 73 showed favorable outcomes based on the Glasgow Outcome Scale, but only 28 completed cognitive evaluations, which were then compared to healthy controls.
- Results indicated that many patients experienced significant cognitive deficits, especially in language and verbal memory, despite being categorized with favorable outcomes, with factors like longer hospital stays, older age, and lower education correlating with poorer performance.
Interictal dysphoric disorder (IDD) is a poorly understood psychiatric disorder of epilepsy patients. Interictal dysphoric disorder is characterized by depressive, somatoform, and affective symptoms observed in up to 5.9% of drug-resistant mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (MTLE-HS).
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- The study aimed to find out how different factors, like age, education, and medication, affect cognitive performance in Brazilian patients with pharmacoresistant mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE).
- It involved 93 patients and looked at various variables through regression analysis to see which ones predicted scores on 24 cognitive tests.
- Results showed that higher education was the strongest positive predictor for cognitive performance, while left side lesions, longer disease duration, and certain medications had negative impacts on cognitive scores, explaining up to 44% of variation in the test results.
Objectives: Sleepiness and cognitive impairment are common symptoms observed in patients with epilepsy. We investigate whether self-reported sleepiness is associated with cognitive performance in patients with refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis (MTLE-HS). Seventy-one consecutive patients with MTLE-HS were evaluated with the Stanford Sleepiness Scale (SSS) before neuropsychological evaluation.
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- Interictal hypometabolism in the temporal lobe of patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE-HS) is detected using FDG-PET imaging, revealing that left-sided hypometabolism relates to verbal memory problems, while right-sided hypometabolism affects nonverbal memory.
- In a study comparing 32 surgically treated MTLE-HS patients to 21 healthy controls, the epilepsy patients scored significantly lower on several cognitive tests, indicating impaired memory and language functions.
- Despite exploring the relationship between mitochondrial enzyme activities and cognitive test performances, the study found no significant associations, suggesting that memory impairments in MTLE-HS are not linked to the measured enzymatic activities in the affected temporal lobe regions
Mitochondrial respiratory chain complex enzyme activities of limbic structures and psychiatric diagnosis in temporal lobe epilepsy patients: Preliminary results.
CNS Neurosci Ther
August 2017