Attention in Adult Intracranial Tumors Patients

Abstract

This study investigated the neuropsychological effects of intracranial tumors on attention, prior to irradiation and chemotherapy. Subjects (n = 55) being treated for low-grade, supratentorial brain tumors were administered tests of attention and working memory. We divided the tumor patients into a "superficial" regional group (e.g., gliomas that infiltrate white matter and meningiomas attached to the cortical surface) and classified them into four brain regions: anterior left side, anterior right side, posterior left side, posterior right side. The groups were also classified into either a combined anterior group or combined posterior group, and either a combined left hemispheric group or combined right hemispheric group. All groups were compared to deep tumor (DT) patients (e.g., pituitary and pineal tumors) and a demographically normal control (NC) group (n = 63). While the NC group primarily outperformed the brain tumor groups on the neuropsychological measures, there were instances where the individual brain tumor groups demonstrated higher scores than the NC group. Significant differences among the brain tumor groups were only found on Digits Forward. The DT group performed significantly worse than the superficial regional groups and the combined anterior and combined posterior groups on Digits Forward. The DT group was also worse than the combined left hemispheric and right hemispheric groups on Digits Forward. The fact that the DT group performed similarly to the other patient groups on the remaining attention measures suggests that these tumors are associated with especially poor attentional performance.

Selection of intraoperative tasks for awake mapping based on relationships between tumor location and functional networks

“…Nonetheless, when objective neuropsychological assessments have been performed in tumor patients (for a review, see Klein et al 83 ), visuospatial, memory, attention, planning, learning, emotional, motivational, and behavioral deficits have regularly been observed after brain surgery. 3,4,11,12,19,29,55,70,74,75,78,82,87,90,91,101,102,108,111,113,125,137,141,142,149,154 Because these postoperative deficits may have consequences for quality of life, they should lead physicians to change awake surgery paradigms to prevent such permanent cognitive impairments. Indeed, it was recently demonstrated that an increase in reaction time on the picture-naming task, even with normal scores, could prevent patients from returning to normal professional activities.…”

“…29, 70,75,78,83,100,106,108,114,125,140,142,153 Such findings raise the question whether it is necessary to add complementary intraoperative tasks such as translation, cross-modal visual-verbal judgment tasks, spontaneous speech, social cognition tasks, or even memory-specific tasks to map and preserve these functions. The answer is probably to adapt the selection to the definition of the quality of life at the individual level, on the basis of the patient characteristics discussed above.…”

Cognition and resective surgery for diffuse infiltrative glioma: an overview

“…For instance, some patients demonstrated minor deterioration in attention after resection of parenchymal frontal or precentral tumors [47, 57] and resection of the right prefrontal cortex rather than the left was associated with a selective attentional impairment in Stroop test performance [58]. After resection of the supplementary motor area, patients exhibited impaired procedural learning and agraphia [59, 60].…”

Neurocognitive Effects of Primary Brain Tumors

“…(6) Executive functions-phonemic word fluency [38]. (7) Frontal Assessment Battery-FAB to assess frontal functionality [39].…”

“…Specific cognitive domain deficits after brain tumor removal were observed in some studies. A study conducted by Goldstein et al [7] reported minimal deterioration in attention after right parenchymal frontal or precentral tumors resection. Another study [8] concluded that right rather than left prefrontal cortex resection was associated with, stroop performance test, selective attentional decline.…”