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To describe clinical characteristics and evaluate processes of care and outcomes at discharge in patients with ischemic stroke with and without preexisting dementia.

Several studies indicate semantic fluency more sensitively discriminates patients with Alzheimer disease (AD) from normal elderly persons, with disproportionate impairment of semantic over phonemic fluency.

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the longitudinal patterns of recovery of quality of life over the first year after stroke to understand the factors that are influential in this process. Method: A sample of 116 stroke survivors with mild to moderate impairment was followed-up at 3 months and at 1 year after stroke onset. Changes in scores on a quality of life measure were assessed in association with changes in impairment and disability over this 9-month period. The use of rehabilitation services over the first year was also documented. Results: The quality of life of these survivors improved over the first year after stroke. Improvements in motor disability and depressive symptoms were found to be associated with improvements in quality of life. Additionally, survivors receiving rehabilitation therapy reported an improvement in quality of life that was independent of changes in disability and depressive symptoms. Conclusions: Opportunities to enhance the quality of life of stroke survivors exist throughout the first year of recovery. Improvements in functional ability and depression are important for long-term improvements in quality of life. Rehabilitation therapy is a potentially important resource.

The effect of hemianopia on line bisection is not known. To study this, manual line bisection in 30 patients with unilateral cerebral hemispheric lesions was examined. The mean bisection point in a group of eight patients with left hemineglect was biased rightward (ipsilaterally), as expected. Among the remaining 22 patients, eight had right hemianopic visual defects, eight had left hemianopic visual defects, and six had normal visual fields. Both groups of patients with contralateral visual field defects had mean bisection points biased contralaterally, compared with 68 normal subjects. This bias was less than the ipsilateral (opposite) bias of patients with hemineglect. Contralateral bisection bias was more evident in those whose field defect involved the macular region. No bias was seen in patients with neither field defects nor hemineglect. The contralateral bias in hemianopia may represent either non-veridical spatial representation within a visual hemifield or a consequence of the strategic adaptation of attention into contralateral hemispace after hemianopia.