Cognition and major depression after frontal and cerebellar stroke (P7.133)

OBJECTIVE: This study related depressive symptoms to cognition in individuals with frontal and cerebellar CVA. BACKGROUND: Depression is the most common psychiatric issue found after CVA with prevalence rates reported up to 50[percnt]. Cognitive impairments also exist in a subgroup of individuals after CVA depending on location, side and size of infarction. A relationship between emotional status and cognitive impairment has been demonstrated in other patient populations such that poor mood state was associated with poorer cognitive abilities over-and-above deficits associated with neurologic disease alone. DESIGN/METHODS: Thirty-one patients with cerebellar-CVA (9 left, 17 right, 5 bilateral) and 28 patients with frontal-lobe-CVA (11 left, 12 right, 5 bilateral) were tested an average of 2 months after DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) was evaluated for all A two-way ANOVA quantified interactions between Type of Stroke (frontal, cerebellar) and Psychiatric Diagnosis (MDD, no MDD) with performance on cognitive tasks (attention, memory, language, spatial, executive) as dependent measures. RESULTS: Thirty-three percent of patients were depressed after frontal-lobe-CVA and 40[percnt] after cerebellar-CVA. There were no laterality differences in proportions of depressed. A significant (p u003c 0.05) Type of Stroke x Depression interaction was found for 3 measures of temporal lobe functioning (List Learning, Story Memory, and Semantic Fluency) such that depressed frontal-CVA patients performed poorest on these tasks compared to non-depression frontal-CVA The opposite was true for cerebellar patients such that depressed patients with cerebellar CVA actually performed better than non-depressed cerebellar patients. CONCLUSIONS: Results in individuals with frontal lobe CVA were consistent with previous studies showing associations between cognition and depression in other neurologic disease. Disconnection and disruption in brain regions involving both emotion regulation and cognition may explain these associations. Alternatively, or simultaneously, depression may transiently impair cognitive test performance after frontal lobe stroke. Study Supported by: Disclosure: Dr. Dulay has nothing to disclose. Dr. Agbayani has nothing to disclose. Dr. Gadhia has nothing to disclose. Dr. Lai has nothing to disclose. Dr. Volpi has nothing to disclose. Dr. Chiu has nothing to disclose. Dr. Zhang has nothing to disclose. Dr. Britz has nothing to disclose.