Reproducibility of hemispheric blood flow increases during line bisectioning.
OBJECTIVE
To determine if attention-related changes of hemispheric perfusion increases, as assessed by blood-flow sensitive techniques, are as reliable as language-related hemispheric perfusion increases.


METHODS
The reproducibility of hemispheric blood flow velocity increases during a line bisection task was assessed with functional transcranial Doppler sonography.


RESULTS
Over repeated examinations, the index of lateralization of 20 healthy subjects showed a high test-retest reproducibility (r=0.9, P<0.01). No practice effects were detected over the course of 10 re-assessments of one subject.


CONCLUSIONS
Hemispheric lateralization of visuospatial attention is a robust phenomenon and can be reliably determined using perfusion sensitive measurements. Future studies should focus on investigating lesion-related reorganization of attentional processing with blood-flow sensitive techniques.
Flöel
Agnes
A
Department of Neurology, University Hospital of Münster, University of Münster, Albert-Schweitzer-Strasse 33, Münster, Germany. floeel@uni-muenster.de
Lohmann
Hubertus
H
Breitenstein
Caterina
C
Dräger
Bianca
B
Buyx
Alena
A
Henningsen
Henning
H
Knecht
Stefan
S
D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000098:blood supply* / Q000502:physiology*; D002560:Cerebrovascular Circulation / Q000502:physiology*; D004292:Dominance, Cerebral / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018608:Ultrasonography, Doppler / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards