Cognitive Function Assessment in Patients With Focal Brain Injury

The study of patients with focal lesions is at the origin of many key discoveries in the field of neurology and cognitive neuroscience.

There are many mechanisms of injury in the brain. The investigators focus on delineated lesions (as opposed to panencephalic, infectious or traumatic lesions), including stroke, excision of intracranial expansive processes or cortectomies of epileptogenic foci.

At the CHUGA, several hundred patients are hospitalized each year for stroke, several dozen patients are operated on brain tumor and about thirty patients benefit from surgical treatment for their epilepsy.

Post-injury cognitive disorders represent a large heterogeneous class of neurological disorders. They are differentiated by various clinical and neuropsychological profiles involving different higher functions such as attention, language, memory, decision-making or executive functions. This variability observed in these disorders complicates their characterization. Especially, there is no, on a sufficiently large scale, data collection to establish whether cognitive deficits are explained by the relative contribution of the type of test used, the location of the lesion, the nature of the pathology and the post-injury delay. This requires a large cohort of patients.

The objective of this project is precisely to build a structure-function database in patients with focal brain injury (post-stroke or post-cortical resection), with the aim of conducting a transnosographic and longitudinal study of brain functions in these patients. To the knowledge of the investigators, this type of approach has not yet been proposed. Such a project should eventually lead to a better understanding of the nature of the cognitive deficits observed in different types of lesions, and to refine the correlations between structures and functions. This project is in line with the objectives set by the University Hospital Federation NeuroPsyNov, which was labeled in 2015 (Dir P. Kahane, fhu-neuropsynov.chu-grenoble.fr) and aims to encourage transnosographic and translational studies of neurological and psychiatric diseases.

Inclusion criteria

• Male and female patients, 18-70 years old
• A single, focal anatomical lesion of a given cerebral territory (post vascular, post surgical resection) documented by MRI
• Intellectual ability and understanding of instructions compatible with the cognitive tasks to be performed

Exclusion criteria

• Patient deprived of liberty
• Somatic disorder likely to affect cognitive abilities
• Pregnant or nursing woman