Cognitive Outcomes and Activity of Daily Living for Neurosurgical Patients with Intrinsic Brain Lesions: A 1-year Prevalence Study

Evaluation of Early Postoperative Cognitive Dysfunction Incidence and Involved Neurocognitive Functions in Patients with Cardiac and Noncardiac Surgery Under General Anesthesia

Objective: To analyse postoperative cognitive dysfunction’s (POCD) incidence and cognitive areas involved, in patients with cardiac and general surgery.

Material and Methods: Prospective observational study on 130 patients undergoing general or heart surgery on cardiopulmonary bypass, under general anesthesia. Two groups, 65 members each. Group A had a heart surgery and group B a noncardiac surgery. The same type of anesthetic drugs were used. All patients completed the Montreal Cognitive Assesment (MoCA) questionnaire: preoperative, 24 hours after stopping any medicine acting on central nervous system and 7 days postoperative. We compared the MoCA scores obtained on different cognitive domains in this moments for each group of patients, for neurocognitive functions: visuo-spatial executive, naming, attention, verbal fluency, abstraction, recall, orientation, final score. We compared the scores between the two groups at 24 hours and 7 days postoperatively for the same domains.

Results: POCD was found at 24 hours testing in both groups. At 7 days postoperatively POCD was not found in any of the groups. There was no statistically significant difference in total final score between two groups at 24 hours nor at 7 days postoperative testing. There are significant differences between the two groups, with lower score in cardiac group in 5 of 7 fields at 24 hours testing, with the persistence of difference in 2 of 7 fields at 7 days.

Conclusions: Overall POCD was present at 24 hours but was not found at 7 days testing for none of the groups. POCD is present in some neurocognitive domains and this depends on surgery type.

Early MoCA-assessed cognitive impairment after aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage and relationship to 1-year functional outcome

Recent clinical research into aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) has confirmed the long-term effect of cognitive dysfunction on functional outcomes. We hypothesized that early cognitive impairment was a marker of permanent brain injury and hence predicted long-term functional outcome. Hong Kong Chinese patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage were evaluated prospectively by means of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in the subacute phase (2-4 weeks after aSAH) and by neuropsychological evaluation of functional outcomes in the chronic phase (1 year after aSAH). This multi-center prospective observational study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov of the US National Institutes of Health (NCT01038193). One hundred and eight patients completed both the subacute and chronic phase assessments. Cognitive dysfunction in the subacute phase independently correlated with functional outcomes at 1 year, after adjusting for age, admission clinical condition, treatment modality, motor score, and mobility in the subacute phase, but the positive predictive values remained low. MoCA-assessed cognitive impairment in the subacute phase cannot accurately predict functional outcomes at 1 year. Future study should focus on understanding the relative importance of different components of early cognitive impairment.