Aphasia and neglect are uncommon in cerebellar disease: negative findings in a prospective study in acute cerebellar stroke.

The aim of the present study was to examine if the most frequent cognitive disorders after cortical damage with a well-known cerebral lateralization, namely aphasia, neglect and extinction, are present in an unselected series of continuously admitted patients with acute cerebellar stroke. Twenty-two adults with acute cerebellar stroke were compared with 22 age- and education-matched healthy control subjects. High-resolution magnetic resonance images showed infarctions of the left cerebellar hemisphere in 12 and of the right hemisphere in ten patients. Standard aphasia tests revealed no statistically significant difference comparing patients with right- and left-sided ischemia and controls, whereas patients with left-sided ischemia showed mild deficits in a verb generation task. Neglect and extinction tasks revealed no significant differences between groups. Our findings support previous observations in the literature that cerebellar patients frequently perform within the normal range in standard neuropsychological tests. This does not exclude, however, that abnormalities may be present in more sophisticated testing of language and visuospatial functions.