Right hemisphere brain damage

Right hemisphere brain damage
Horizontal section of right cerebral hemisphere
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Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) is the result of injury to the right brain hemisphere. The right hemisphere of the brain coordinates tasks for functional communication, which include problem solving, memory, and reasoning. Deficits caused by right hemisphere brain damage vary depending on the location of the damage.

Patients with right hemisphere brain damage most commonly have difficulties with attention, perception, learning, memory, recognition and expression of emotion, and neglect. Other frequently occurring, though slightly less common, deficits include reasoning and problem solving, awareness, and orientation. It is also common for patients with right hemisphere damage to have a flat affect, lack of emotional expression, while speaking. Additionally, these patients commonly have difficulty recognizing other people's emotions when expressed through facial expressions and tone of voice. Although these deficits alone may complicate therapy, the patient may also exhibit anosognosia, or ignorance of his or her impairments. Due to possible anosognosia, it is common for patients to not become frustrated or upset when they are unable to complete tasks they were previously able to complete.

Difficulties with communication are likely to be linked to a patient's cognitive deficits. For example, communication breakdown may result because a patient with right hemisphere brain damage fails to observe appropriate social conventions or because the patient may ramble and fail to recognize appropriate times to take conversational turns. The patient may also have difficulty comprehending sarcasm, irony, and other paralinguistic aspects of communication. Additionally, individuals with right hemisphere brain damage may have impaired advanced language abilities such as narrative skills. Patients may find it difficult to extract the theme of a story, or arrange sentences based on the theme of a story.

A frequently occurring motor deficit is left-sided hemiparesis (in strokes affecting the motor cortex). A less common motor deficit in this population is dysphagia.

Patients with right hemisphere brain damage often display sensory deficits such as left neglect, in which they ignore everything in the left visual field. This neglect can be present throughout many daily activities including reading, writing and self-care activities. For example, individuals with left neglect typically leave out details on the neglected side of drawings or try to draw out all the details on the nonneglected side.Homonymous hemianopsia is another sensory deficit that is sometimes observed in this population.

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