Desempenho atencional de adultos pós AVC unilateral ou TCE no teste de cancelamento dos sinos

Abstract

Attention is a cognitive function that is very often impaires in neurological disorders, such as stroke or traumatic brain injury (TBI). Among the instruments that evaluate visual selective attention by means of a cancellation paradigm, The Bells Test (BT) is one of the most used and internationally known. The study of hemineglect syndrome in which patients neglect the contralateral or ipsilateral visual hemifield due to a neurological disorder- with tests of attention and visuoperception is still under development. This dissertation aimed to characterize the performance of patients with stroke or TBI in the BT. In the first study, we systematically reviewed articles with cancellation tasks in neuropsychological testing of these populations. Searching with the following keywords representing the constructs cancellation, stroke and TBI in the databases PubMed, PsycINFO and LILACS, we found 86 studies with 26 cancellation paradigms. In the second study we compared the performance between groups of 46 patients after unilateral stroke and 46 matched healthy controls, establishing as well the percentage frequency of deficits and analysed the dissociations between cases in TS. Patients with right brain damage (RBD) showed an inferior accuracy performance when compared to controls, also differing from left brain damaged adults (LBD), showing a slower speed processing. We identified 22% of RBD patients with HN, and a greater prevalence of disorganized strategies. In the third and last study, we compared the performance in TS between TBI patients and matched healthy controls. There was a poorer performance of patients with TBI with a greater number of omissions on the left side and lower speed processing. In addition, suggestive signs of HN were found in 38% of the sample of TBI patients. More research is needed to characterize clinical syndromes regarding the occurrence of HN after a TBI through the traditionally known cancellation paradigm.