Document Type
Article
Abstract
Among stroke survivors, linguistic and non-linguistic impairments exhibit substantial inter-individual variability. Stroke lesion volume and location do not sufficiently explain outcomes, and the neural mechanisms underlying the severity of aphasia or non-verbal cognitive deficits remain inadequately understood. Converging evidence supports the idea that white matter is particularly susceptible to ischaemic injury, and long-range fibres are commonly associated with verbal and non-verbal function. Here, we investigated the relationship among post-stroke aphasia severity, cognition, and white matter integrity. Eighty-seven individuals in the chronic stage of stroke underwent diffusion MRI and behavioural testing, including language and cognitive measures. We used whole-brain structural connectomes from each participant to calculate the ratio of long-range fibres to short-range fibres. We found that a higher proportion of long-range fibres was associated with lower aphasia severity, more accurate picture naming, and increased performance on non-verbal semantic memory/processing and non-verbal reasoning while controlling for lesion volume, key damage areas, age, and years post stroke. Our findings corroborate the hypothesis that, after accounting for age and lesion anatomy, inter-individual differences in post-stroke aphasia severity, verbal, and non-verbal cognitive outcomes are related to the preservation of long-range white matter fibres beyond the lesion.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Brain Communications, Volume 6, Issue 4, 2024, pages fcae262-.
Rights
© 2024, © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
APA Citation
Roth, R. W., Schwen Blackett, D., Gleichgerrcht, E., Wilmskoetter, J., Rorden, C., Newman-Norlund, R., Sen, S., Fridriksson, J., Busby, N., & Bonilha, L. (2024). Long-range white matter fibres and post-stroke verbal and non-verbal cognition. Brain Communications, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcae262