Research project A delayed significant improvement of cognition among young stroke survivors 10-year after stroke. What have happened in the brain?
Significance: Long-term cognitive alterations after stroke remain largely unknown. Through the rigorous rfMRI examination on the unique stroke cohort with long-term cognitive recovery, we may fill a gap of knowledge concerning the neuroplasticity behind the long-term cognitive recovery among those stroke survivors.
By using both global cognitive assessment with a comprehensive neuropsychological test battery, we demonstrated recently the concordance of cognitive improvements between domain-specific and global cognitions in a longitudinal study. This is among an unique cohort with 38 young stroke survivors (age between 18-65 at stroke onset) living in the community of Umeå 10 years after first-ever stroke.
In this unique cohort, brain functional connectivity was examined by resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI). We found that strong relation between higher integrity of frontoparietal network connectivity with long-term performance improvement on the Digit Span Backwards task at 10-year after stroke.
