Executive Function of Persian-speaking aphasia patients with stroke

Background and Objectives: Stroke patients with aphasia may suffer from executive dysfunction including deficits in planning, problem-solving, response inhibition, decision-making, and cognitive flexibility. Set-shifting is a lower-level form of cognitive flexibility that can be measured by Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). We sought to investigate the set-shifting skill and its association with the language difficulties of Persian-speaking patients with aphasia.Materials and Methods: It was a cross-sectional and descriptive-analytical study. We included 19 Persian-speaking stroke patients with aphasia. The subjects completed Bedside version of Persian WAB (P-WAB-1), WCST, and Mini-Cog Test, which examined language, set-shifting, and cognitive status of the patients, respectively. The perseveration error (PE) as a primary index of set-shifting was measured. Also, total number of corrects (TNC), total number of errors (TNE), non-perseverative errors (NPE), and the number of categories completed (NCC) were calculated. Spearman correlation coefficient and Mann-Whitney U test were run in SPSS 23.0.Findings: The severity of aphasia and PE were inversely correlated (P<0.05, r=-0.48). There was a significant correlation between the fluency sub-test of P-WAB and NCC (P<0.05, r=0.54) and TNC (P<0.05, r=0.61). Further, there was a significant inverse correlation between the fluency sub-test of P-WAB and TNE (P<0.05, r=-0.60) and NPE (P<0.05, r=-0.44). There was no significant difference in the WCST indices between patients with frontal and non-frontal lesions (P> 0.05).Conclusion: The results revealed that aphasic patients show the symptoms of executive dysfunction, particularly set-shifting and cognitive flexibility. Moreover, fluency index as a speech subset may be affected by executive function. These results may be beneficial for designing rehabilitation programs for aphasic patients.

کلیدواژه ها:

Set-shifting ، Flexibility ، Aphasia ، Stroke