Rinsho Shinkeigaku (Clinical Neurology)

Symposium 4

Clinical application of prism adaptation for patients with unilateral spatial neglect

Hisaaki Ota, Ph.D.1)

1)Department of Occupational Therapy, School of Health Sciences, Sapporo Medical University

Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is defined as a failure to pay attention to the contralesional space due to the brain damage. As this symptom affects on many aspect of activities of daily living, a lots of therapeutic approaches were developed so far. Among them, prism adaptation (PA) technique is one of the most promising methods because it could produce generalized and long lasting after-effect and is effective even for chronic USN patients. It is, however, true that there are USN patients showing no PA effect. Unfortunately, we cannot tell in advance who can adapt to prisms and show improvement of their neglect symptom at this moment. In further studies, to know who is more likely to adapt to prisms we should analyze clinical data from USN patients showing improvement by PA. In addition, to be an effective PA technique for much more patients with USN we should clarify what it the best condition in PA task.
Full Text of this Article in Japanese PDF (596K)

(CLINICA NEUROL, 53: 1270|1272, 2013)
key words: unilateral spatial neglect, prism adaptation, intervention, amelioration

(Received: 1-Jun-13)