Stroke is the second or the third leading cause of death and the leading producer of disability among adults in Lithuania and Western countries. Surgery is very important to treatment and prevention of ischemic cerebrovascular disease, but the selection of patients for it must be based on meticulous evaluation of surgery risk and factors influencing follow-ups. The aim of this study was to evaluate the selection criteria for cerebral revascularisation in patients with ischemic cerebrovascular diseases and factors affecting postoperative follow-ups. The innovativeness and originality of this study is the complex evaluation of neurological, neuroradiological, neurophysiological factors in patients with ischemic cerebrovascular disease before and after cerebral revascularisation. The evaluation of the influence of cerebral revascularisation to the neurological status of the patients, the possibilities of cerebral revascularisation for patients with Moyamoya disease, the factors affecting the neurological status of patients after cerebral revascularisation, the postoperative complications, death causes of patients after cerebral revascularisation and the surviving after cerebral revascularisation was done. The specification of the factors affecting outcomes after cerebral revascularisation was done too.

Despite lack of scientific evidence, hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO2) has been used as a treatment for children with cerebral palsy (CP). Recently, a multi-centre randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial assessed the efficacy of HBO2 therapy for children with CP. Using the same cohort, the purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of HBO2 therapy on hand function using the Jebsen-Taylor test. All children received 40 treatments over a 2-month period. HBO2 treatments were 60 minutes with 100% O2 at 1.75 atmospheres absolute (ATA). Placebo treatments were also 60 minutes with air (21% O2) at 1.3 ATA. Seventy-eight children with CP, aged 3--12 years completed pre and post hand function assessments. Hand function was evaluated using one quantitative measure (time) and three qualitative measures. There were no significant changes between baseline and follow-up tests for any of the measures, although both experimental and control groups improved ( p = 0.08) their total times for the Jebsen test. The HBO2 group improved by 54.5 seconds (8.8%) while the placebo group improved by 47.8 seconds (7.7%). The results indicate that HBO2 therapy did not enhance the hand function of children with CP.

Dichotic listening of auditory stimuli is used to assess brain lateralisation by simultaneously presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears to determine which syllable was perceived as being the clearest. There is a limited, albeit dated number of studies that have examined dichotic listening performance in adults who stutter (AWS) and the results remain inconclusive. The aim of this research was to investigate whether AWS show a difference in the magnitude of the right ear advantage (REA) in both undirected and directed attentional tasks when compared with adults who do not stutter (AWNS). There were 14 right-handed participants, consisting of seven AWS and seven age and sex matched AWNS controls. All participants were screened for normal hearing. They completed a dichotic listening task, which included undirected and directed attentional listening tasks. Participants were to select the consonant-vowel (CV) pair they heard the clearest. The interaural intensity difference (IID) was modulated randomly during the undirected attention task. The results for the undirected task revealed: (1) a significant REA for AWS for the IID conditions of 0 to +21 dB and significant left ear advantages (LEA) for IIDs of -15 to -21 dB; (2) a significant REA for AWNS for the IID conditions of -9 to +21 dB and significant LEAs for IIDs of -18 to -21 dB; (3) laterality index scores with a significant IID effect but no significant group or group-by-ear interaction effects using parametric statistics. Further analysis of laterality using non-parametric statistics found significant differences between the fluency groups. In general, the findings in this study were revealing of differences between AWS and AWNS when performing dichotic listening tasks with speech stimuli. The primary difference observed between groups was in regards to the IID point at which a previous REA became a LEA. This “crossing-over” point occurred later for AWNS, indicating a strong left hemisphere advantage for the processing of speech. The earlier “crossing-over” for AWS would indicate that the right hemisphere was activated sooner for the processing of speech compared to AWNS. This activation of the right hemisphere is assumed to reflect more diffuse cerebral lateralisation for speech processing for the AWS and confirms past brain imaging studies. In the directed attention task, there was no significant difference between AWS and AWNS indicating that instances of stuttering may occur due to more automatic (bottom-up) speech processing. These findings have implications for theories of laterality and hemispheric asymmetry for phonological processing for AWS, which has been suggested to reflect a subgroup of AWS for whom cerebral dominance is related to their disfluency.

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Five tachistoscopic studies were conducted to investigate patterns of hemispheric specialization for different types of word pair comparisons among monolinguals and fluent bilingual adults. Bilinguals were further grouped as "early" or "late" depending on whether their second language was acquired in infancy or in adolescence. All groups were faster at making orthographic comparisons for left visual field input but were faster in the right visual field for phonological and syntactic judgments. Semantic comparisons yielded no visual field asymmetries for monolinguals or late bilinguals but yielded a left visual field superiority for early bilinguals. Group differences in response strategy were also noted whereby early bilinguals favoured semantic processing and late bilinguals surface processing. The results are interpreted to suggest that lateralization patterns are primarily influenced by task-related processing demands but that early versus late onset of bilingualism predisposes the use of different processing strategies for performing a particular task.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the psychometric properties and clinical utility of the Functional Mobility Scale (FMS) for children with cerebral palsy (CP). The FMS quantifies mobility according to the need for assistive devices in different environmental settings. Initially a systematic review was conducted on the psychometric properties and clinical utility of existing evaluative outcome measures that assessed activity limitation in children with CP. Good to excellent reliability was found for all tools. In contrast, the validity and responsiveness of many tools required further investigation. The FMS was the only tool to quantify activity with different assistive devices for a range of environmental settings. A key objective of this thesis was to investigate the reliability, construct, concurrent and discriminative validity, as well as the responsiveness to change of the FMS. (For complete abstract open document)

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio State University. / Bibliography: leaves 118-128. Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2004. / Adviser: David A. Boas. Submitted to the Dept. of Electrical Engineering. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 407-416). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;