Brain Disorders & Therapy

Are there differences between acute and home-dowelling stroke clients on their executive functions skills

Global Summit on Stroke

August 03-05, 2015 Birmingham, UK

Naomi Josman

Scientific Tracks Abstracts: Brain Disord Ther

Abstract:

Background: Executive functions are defined as higher-order functions necessary for performing complex or non-routine tasks.
Post-stroke people are often encumbered by impaired executive functions which hinder their capacity to return to everyday life
functioning. During the rehabilitation process, clinicians strive to engage stroke clients in complex functional activities which
are neither time-consuming nor expensive, yet are geared specifically to train and augment executive functions. Employing
functional virtual environments is becoming an increasingly important training solution. The current study objectives were to
describe the respective executive performance profiles for two samples of post-stroke clients and to investigate their distinctive
performance of acute and home-dwelling stroke clients using a virtual supermarket platform for assessing executive functions.
Method: Two groups were included in this study: 35 acute post-stroke participants (29 men and 6 women, mean age±SD
65.54±11.29 years). The home dowelling group included 24 participants (22 men and 2 women, mean age±SD 58.9±5.5 years).
Instrument: Virtual Action Planning-Supermarket (VAP-S) is a virtual supermarket developed as a clinically-sound and
ecologically valid researchtool for assessing executive functions. The VAP-S task performance for each participant is gauged
using eight outcome measures recorded by computer.
Results: Significant differences were found between the average age and year of education of the two groups. A MANCOVA
test revealed significant between group performance differences, F (6, 45)=6.98, p=0.001, ES-η2=0.29 with the home-dwelling
stroke clients performing better than the acute group. No effects for age and years of education were found.
Conclusion: Executive functions such as efficiency and time performance do improve over time. Is this improvement attributable
to the rehabilitation process? Or alternately does brain recovery expedite better executive functioning? Investigating the neural
correlates of executive functions during performance of everyday activities is proposed as a further key step in research of
people following stroke.

Biography :

Naomi Josman has completed her PhD from New York University and Postdoctoral studies from Hebrew University. She is a Professor of Occupational Therapy
in the University of Haifa, Israel. She also serves as Director of the PhD program. She is an internationally recognized leader, scholar and educator in the area of
cognitive rehabilitation and she has published more than 80 papers. Her research investigates cognition, metacognition, executive functions and their influence on
everyday life. Her work is based on an ecologically-valid assessment of cognitive impairments to performance-based assessments utilizing innovative methods and
tools inter alia virtual reality for evaluation and intervention.