The International Tinnitus Journal

Gerstmann Syndrome Case-Control Study: Correlation between Brain Lesions & Functional Disability

Author(s): Abdulnaser Abdulqader Salih Al-Samaraie

Deep functional and structural neuroimaging of a series of Gerstmann's syndrome patients required high accuracy, and our results avoided false overlaps of heterogeneous brain lesions by handling each case of our study subjects separately as an individual case regarding functional and neuroimaging tests. Six patients with Gerstmann tetrad (one with dominant acalculia, one with dominant left and right disorientation, two with writing disabilities and two with finger agnosia) and 6 control subjects with close ages were recruited in the current study. In the main phase, we assessed brain activation in response to experimental and interventional settings using neuroimaging techniques (FMRI-Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging- where twelve pictures were taken on a Dell inspiration 3T all-body scanner with sequences of echo pictures, 80o angled, TE 35 ms) of the subject’s brain to declare lesions existence and locations that might result in one of the four cognitive impairment domains of Gerstman’s syndrome tetrad. We assessed statistically significant differences of patient images vs. control images as well as the images of patients presenting specific symptomatic cognitive dysfunction domain vs. the images of patients presenting the three other domains. Neuroimages were analyzed using multiple databases such as T1 weighted and free sequence types. Gerstmann’s syndrome is mainly connected to injury in the dominant parietal lobe, so images comparisons and analysis were only restricted to the left parietal lobe region. P values <0.05were only considered as statistically significant difference in comparisons of functional tests time and accuracy of patients vs. in addition to comparisons of brain images parameters of patient group vs. control group and specific symptomatic domain patients vs. other symptomatic domains patients. Regarding functional testing, Patients group took significantly higher time compared to control group. Regarding brain images parameters, patients in each domain showed significantly different lesions compared to other domains. Moreover, control subjects showed no lesions in the left parietal lobe compared to significant lesions in the patient groups. These results oppose the theory of Gerstmann that a common brain structural injury may result in the combination of all of the four symptomatic dysfunction domains. This may be due to the fact that Gerstmann examined incomplete cases which represent a considerable criticism to his scientific basis. Moreover, he excluded patients with speech difficulties and apraxia.

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