Introduction: Cerebrovascular disease causes different cognitive alterations. There is a need to develop tools that are capable of diagnosing them. One of them could be event related potentials. These provide an indicator of cognitive processing in real time.
Patients and methods: A study was conducted of 10 patients with cerebral infarction in the frontal region and 10 paired healthy controls. Evaluation of the patients was performed a week after the stroke. A continuous performance test was applied to both groups together with the recording of the electrical activity in the brain in order to obtain the P300 component. The results were submitted to the non-parametric Student's t test, and the Bayesian model averaging method (BMAM) was employed to calculate the sources generating the electrical activity recorded on the electroencephalogram.
Results: Patients displayed significantly poorer performances compared to the healthy controls in the attention test. The BMAM showed that the P300 component was related to the right hand temporal structures in healthy controls, whereas the left temporoparietal regions were also involved in the patients.
Conclusions: These findings indicate the existence of subclinical disorders affecting sustained attention and that they can only be detected by very sensitive tools; furthermore, they also have implications for the brain circuits regulating sustained attention and the P300 component.