Tactile and Proprioceptive Discriminative Sensory Dysfunction After Unilateral Stroke

Smi, Choi Kwon

Abstract

Although sensory deficits caused by stroke have been occasionally reported, dysfunctions of discriminative sensation have seldom been studied in patients with strokes. With the use of specifically designed methods, discriminative sensations including texture discrimination and position sense were tested in 67 patients with acute unilateral stroke. Thirty-two age and sex-matched healthy subjects were used as controls. Impaired discriminative sensation was common in patients with unilateral stroke (detected in 57 out of the 67 patients) regardless of the lesion location except for patients with lateral medullary stroke. Proprioceptive discriminative sensation remained intact in all except for three out of 25 patients who were initially diagnosed as having pure motor stroke on the bases of conventional sensory tests. However, tactile discriminative sensation remained intact in only 17 out of 25 patients. Discriminative sensory disturbances are common in patients with unilateral stroke even in those with intact sensory function on routine examination. The subtle disturbances of this sensation may explain, at least in part, the clumsiness of the patients that is not readily explained by conventional neurological tests.