Time-dependent decline of body-specific attention to the paretic limb in chronic stroke patients

Objective: To examine whether reduced body-specific attention to paretic limb is found in chronic stroke patients in the time-dependent manner.
Methods: Twenty-one patients with chronic hemiparesis (10 left and 11 right hemiparesis) after subcortical stroke and 18 age-matched healthy controls were recruited in this study. Standard neuropsychological examinations showed no clear evidence of spatial neglect in all patients. In order to quantitatively measure the spatial attention to paretic hand, a visual detection task for detecting a target appearing on the surface of either a paretic or dummy hand was used. This task can measure the body facilitation effect, which makes faster detection of a target on the body compared with one far from the body.
Results: In stroke patients, there was no difference in the reaction time for visual target between on the paretic and the dummy hands, while the healthy participants showed faster detection for the visual target on the real hand than that o...