Introduction

The term asomatognosia refers to a unilateral disturbance of body ownership following a cerebrovascular incident. Patients with asomatognosia consider the contralesional limbs as missing or having disappeared from awareness. This neuropsychological disorder modifies body ownership in terms of perceptual experience, visual identification and sense of belonging of contralesional body parts. In the literature, asomatognosia is usually tested by using verbal scales.

Method

In this study, we first developed a new test to assess asomatognosia that includes a visual identification task and a reaching task. We examined 16 healthy participants and 20 right brain damaged patients. The participants were asked to identify, reach and touch their left hand when positioned in peripersonal space, in presence of an extraneous hand (belonging to the examiner). We analyzed how the deficit is modulated by the reciprocal positions in space of the two limbs, the relationship with personal neglect and the anatomical correlate using a Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping (VLSM) analysis with CT data.

Results

The results show that the asomatognosia cannot be simply considered as one of the many manifestations of personal neglect but should be taken into account as a “productive” disorder characterized by the misidentification of the own hand with an extraneous hand. The VLSM analysis of patients with asomatognosia revealed the involvement of the inferior and middle frontal lobe.

Conclusions

The novel task that has been developed in the present study could be used as an objective tool to measure this specific disorder of body ownership or to uncover subclinical conditions of asomatognosia.

中文翻译：

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使用视觉和触及任务对右脑受损患者的异常诊断进行新的临床评估。

介绍

术语“异常诊断”是指脑血管事件后身体所有权的单方面干扰。错诊患者将对侧肢体视为意识缺失或消失。这种神经心理疾病会在感知经验，视觉识别和对侧身体部位的归属感方面改变人体所有权。在文献中，通常使用言语量表来检验患者的诊断能力。

方法

在这项研究中，我们首先开发了一种新的测试来评估患者的诊断能力，包括视觉识别任务和伸手可及的距离。我们检查了16名健康参与者和20名右脑受损患者。要求参与者在有外来手（属于检查者）的情况下，识别，伸出并触摸他们的左手（位于人际空间中）。我们使用CT数据基于体素的病变症状图谱（VLSM）分析了两肢空间中的相互位置，与人为疏忽的关系以及解剖学相关性如何调节赤字。

结果

结果表明，误诊不能简单地看作是个人疏忽的许多表现之一，而应被认为是一种“生产性”疾病，其特征是错误地识别了自己的手。VLSM分析法对患有误诊症的患者进行了检查，结果显示其下额叶和中额叶受累。

结论

在本研究中开发的新任务可以用作客观工具来测量这种特定的机体失调状况或发现亚临床症状。