Impact of Spatial Neglect
In this episode of Kessler Foundation’s podcast, Peii Chen, PhD, senior research scientist at the Center for Stroke Rehabilitation Research at Kessler Foundation, presents “Impact of Spatial Neglect.”
This is part seven of an eight part series. Listen to the series as it's posted.
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Below is an excerpt from the lecture.
Introduction
I'm a senior research scientist at Kessler Foundation. I work at Center for Stroke Rehabilitation Research. I've been working at Kessler Foundation since 2007. So I've been working with KIR for clinical research since then. So a lot of things I'm going to talk about today is actually based on the collaboration, based on the research that we do here and also at Kessler Foundation. So my disclosures, like I said, I'm employed by the Kessler Foundation, and I receive funding from New Jersey Commission on Brain Injury Research and also the National institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research.
And I'm also the lead developer of two instruments that you may heard of: Kessler Foundation Neglect Assessment Process or KF-NAP and the Kessler Foundation Prism Adaptation Treatment or KF-PAT. And related to KF-PAT, there is a patent pending on it. And so even though I'm not going to talk about KF-NAP, KF-PAT, but you may heard of it, and these are actually-- in the foundation, we consider them as product. So if you want to use them, purchase anything about it, the contact person is actually me but-- I'm basically a saleswoman in that regard. But I do not receive any financial bonuses, any compensation from doing it. So please feel free to contact me if you need information related to KF-NAP, KF-PAT. And also, I'm the content creator for two websites. I'm going to show you one of them today. So if you go on this website, you will see this. I'm going to play this later, soon.
Functional Independence
What is functional independence? From clinician perspective, we have our standardized scales. For patients and their family members, their functionally independence could be very different from patient to patient, right? So some patient, they struggle a lot how to return to their normal self, or they have just to adjust with the new life. And one factor prolonging this recovery very significantly is spatial neglect, okay? And before I tell you what it is, I'm going to tell you more numbers. So this number, this stats is actually coming from Kessler Institute. That's we did a study with KIR. We found that this syndrome or disorder, spatial neglect, occurs in 50% of stroke patients in rehabilitation hospital setting.
Spatial Neglect
So what is spatial neglect? It's a syndrome of impaired spatial attention. So most stroke patients, they have unilateral brain damage. So stroke occur in the brain, by the way. A lot of family members or patient themselves, they actually do not know about this. I believe doctor told them, but they're just not paying that much attention at that stage.
However, as you know, stroke affects brain and-- sorry. I'm doing this gesture in the air. So for example, in this case that I'm going to-- this example I'm going to give you today is all based on patient who have right-brain stroke, and they're neglecting the space opposite to the damage. Why is that? As you know, after right-brain stroke, patients' left side, their left body is weaker, right? After left-brain stroke, the right side is weaker. Similarly, attention is the same thing. After right-brain stroke, your attention toward the other side is weaker. If it the stroke happened on the left side, your attention to the right side is weaker. Okay. So these examples are based on different-- I'm going to show many examples. These are examples I collected from patients who have right-brain stroke, and they show left-sided neglect.
