To investigate the relationship between grip and pinch strength and independence in activities of daily living (ADL) in stroke patients.
Medical records of 577 stroke patients from January 2010 to February 2013 were retrospectively reviewed. Patients' grip and pinch strength of both hemiplegic and non-hemiplegic hands and the Korean version of Modified Barthel Index (K-MBI) score were collected. These patients were divided into three groups: group A (onset duration: ≤3 months), group B (onset duration: >3 months and <2 years), and group C (onset duration: ≥2 years). The correlation between grip and pinch strength and the K-MBI score was analyzed.
In group A (95 patients), the K-MBI score was significantly (p<0.05) correlated with the grip and pinch strength of both hands in patients with right hemiplegia. Significant (p<0.05) correlation between the K-MBI score and the grip and pinch strength of the hemiplegic hand was shown in patients with left hemiplegia. In group B (69 patients) and group C (73 patients), the K-MBI score was significantly (p<0.05) correlated with the grip and pinch strength of the hemiplegic hand.
Stroke patients in subacute stage mainly performed activities of daily living using their dominant hand. However, independence in ADL was associated with the strength of the affected dominant hand. For stroke patients in chronic and late chronic stages, their hand power of the affected hand was associated with independence in ADL regardless whether the dominant hand was affected.
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To investigate the hemispheric contributions to prosody recognitions and interference effects of semantic processing on prosody for stroke patients by using the Korean language.
Ten right hemisphere damaged patients (RHD), nine left hemisphere damaged patients (LHD), and eleven healthy controls (HC) participated. In pure prosody recognition task, four semantically neutral sentences were selected and presented in both sad and happy prosodies. In interference task, participants listened to emotionally intoned sentences in which the semantic contents were congruent or incongruent with prosody. Participants were asked to rate the valence of prosody while ignoring the semantic contents, and thus, reaction time and accuracy were estimated.
In pure prosody recognition task, RHD showed low accuracy as compared to HC (p=0.013), and the tendency of group response showed that RHD performed worse than HC and LHD with regards to accuracy and reaction time. In interference task, analysis of accuracy revealed a significant main effect of groups (p=0.04), and the tendency implied that RHD is less accurate as compared to LHD and HC. The RHD took longer reaction times than HC in congruent and incongruent items (p<0.001).
Right hemispheric laterality to prosody processing of Korean language in stroke patients was observed. Interference effects of semantic contents to prosody processing were not observed, which suggested unique characteristics of prosody for Korean language. These results could be referred as preliminary data for future researches on Korean languages.
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