Frontal lobe dysfunction in cerebrovascular disease

Abstract

The frontal lobe is the largest lobe of the brain and it is thus commonly involved in stroke. Moreover, almost one in five strokes is limited to the prerolandic areas. This high frequency of anatomical involvement is in sharp contrast with the apparent rarity of clinical frontal dysfunction in stroke. It is remarkable that frontal behavioural syndromes have rather uncommonly been reported in patients with stroke as compared to patients with other diseases, such as brain tumour. This fact is paradoxical, because an acute process (stroke) is expected to yield more clinical dysfunction than a more chronic disease (tumour). A volume effect may be the main factor leading to this phenomenon. Another interesting aspect of frontal strokes is the contribution of so-called "silent" strokes, the recurrence of which may nevertheless lead to intellectual decline and compromise recovery from another stroke with more specific neurologic dysfunction. The contribution of stroke to understanding of frontal lobe dysfunction is important, because of the focal nature of this disease, and a great opportunity for clinical -topographic classification correlations. One of the first modern attempts to develop a clinical-topographic classification of frontal lobe lesions came from the school of Luria, who tried to delineate three main types of frontal lobe syndromes (premotor syndrome, prefrontal syndrome, medial-frontal syndrome). Recent anatomic correlates using MRI make it possible to improve this classification. We suggest considering six main clinical-anatomic frontal stroke syndromes: (1) prefrontal, (2) premotor, (3) superior medial, (4) orbital-medial, (5) basal forebrain, (6) white matter. Finally,another fascinating topic relates to frontal lobe symptomatology due to stroke sparing the frontal cortex or white matter. This occurs mainly in three instances: lenticulo-capsular stroke, caudate stroke and thalamic stroke. Studies using blood-flow or metabolism measurements suggest that diaschisis (frontal lobe dysfunction from a remote lesion) may play a role. We believe that this is more likely to be related to dynamic interruption of complex circuitry than to static frontal lobe deactivation.