The relationship between visuospatial ability and cognitive function in patients with right-hemisphere infarction.

Introduction: The relationship between visuospatial ability and cognitive function is still controversial among the patients with right-hemisphere damage.

Aim: To elucidate the relationship between the visuospatial ability and cognitive function in patients with right-hemisphere infarction, we analyzed the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) and behavioral inattention test (BIT).

Methods: The present study was based on 54 right-handed patients (35 men, 19 women; 69.3 ± 11.1 years old) who were admitted to our hospital due to the right-hemisphere infarction in acute and subacute stages. Those who showed recent bilateral or infero-tentorial lesions were excluded. A total of 77 sets of MMSE and BIT Japanese edition were carried out. BIT is consisted of conventional and behavioral subtest, and conventional subtest includes 6 subtests: line cancelation, star cancelation and character cancelation subtests were categorized as intentional tasks, whereas copy, line bisection, and drawing subtests as attentional tasks.

Results: With Spearman's rank correlation, there was a significant correlation between MMSE score and number of errors in the attentional tasks (p=0.0022, ρ=-0.352), whereas there was no significant correlation between MMSE score and number of errors in the intentional tasks (p=0.1769).

Conclusion: Since the attentional tasks of BIT were more deeply influenced by cognitive function than the intentional tasks, the visuospatial ability reflecting in the attentional tasks was considered to be more closely associated with the cognitive function among the patients with cerebral infarction on their right cerebral hemisphere.