Chapter 18 - Nervous System Flashcards
Cerebrovascular disease is ___ leading cause of death in US
3rd
Mental status exam evaluates:
- Level of consciousness
- Speech
- Orientation
- Knowledge of current events
- Judgment
- Abstraction
- Vocab
- Emotional responses
- Memory
- Calculation ability
- Object recognition
- Praxis
Describe patients in a coma
- Completely unconscious
- Cannot be roused even by painful stimuli
How to assess level of consciousness
Awake? Alert? Responsive?
How to evaluate a patient’s speech
Recite a short phrase like “no ifs, ands, or buts”
Define dysarthria
Difficulty in articulation
Define dysphonia
Difficulty in phonation (resulting in alteration in volume and tone of voice)
Lesions of the ____ are responsible for dysarthria
Tongue and palate
Lesions of the ____ are responsible for dysphonia
Palate and vocal cords
Define dysphasia
Difficulty comprehending or speaking
What causes dysphasia?
Cerebral dysfunction
Define aphasia
Total loss of speech
How to evaluate orientation
Patient’s awareness of self in relation to person, place, time
An abnormality in recent memory may be caused by a lesion where?
Temporal lobe
The ability to calculate depends on the integrity of what?
Dominant cerebral hemisphere AND patient’s intelligence
Define agnosia
Failure to recognize a sensory stimulus despite normal primary sensation
Define visual agnosia
Patient has normal vision and fails to recognize an object
Define tactile agnosia
Inability to recognize an object by palpation (w/o a sensory defect)
A lesion located in the ___ can cause tactile agnosia
Non-dominant parietal lobe
Define autotopagnosia
Patient’s inability to recognize his or her own body part
Define praxis
Ability to perform a motor activity
Define apraxia
Inability to perform a voluntary movement (w/o deficits in motor strength, sensation, or coordination)
Define dyspraxia
Decreased ability to perform a motor activity
Define constructional apraxia
Patient is unable to construct or draw simple designs (e.g. face of a clock)