Post stroke cognition: A Neuropsychology approach to screening and cognitive trajectories

In this talk I will explain our approach to bring neuropsychology knowledge and theory to investigate post-stroke cognitive impairment and its trajectories. Where previous medical research often refers to an overall ‘post-stroke dementia’, we focus on understanding the nature of cognitive impairments and how these evolve over time post stroke.

I will discuss the discord in terminology in this domain in relation to different silos of research in post stroke cognition. The talk will include an overview of our work on domain-specific screening using the Oxford Cognitive Screen including an overview of trajectories and links to cognitive trajectories and wider impact of domain specific cognitive impairment. I will also introduce OCS-Plus, a new tablet-based screening tool aimed at briefly assessing milder impairments, which is in earlier stage development and currently being validated in chronic stroke.

About the speaker
In my group we cover research along the translational axis in neuropsychology, from fundamental studies into the mechanisms underlying visuo-spatial neglect over lesion-function mapping studies using large cohort clinical scans to applied studies on developing clinical tools for cognitive screening and assessment.

My first undergraduate and masters degrees were in cognitive neurosciences at KULeuven (Belgium), followed by a PhD in neuropsychology at the University of Birmingham (2010) and postdoctoral positions at Birmingham and then Oxford. Subsequently, I received the Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Stroke Association lectureship, and started my independent lab at the University of Oxford as a Principal Investigator in 2015.

I was recently awarded the Stroke Association’s Priority Programme Award (2019) to investigate long term psychological consequences of stroke. My biggest impact work so far has around the development of the Oxford Cognitive screen (www.ocs-test.org), which is now used as the clinical standard in a large number of stroke units in the UK, with 7 translations and renorming/validation studies published in other languages.