Postoperative word-finding difficulties in children with posterior fossa tumours: a crosslinguistic European cohort study
| Author | Affiliation | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
Persson, Karin | ||||
| Date | Volume | Issue | Start Page | End Page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2025-03-12 | 41 | 1 | 1 | 14 |
Art. no. 128
Posterior fossa tumour (PFT) surgery carries a risk of mutism or severely reduced speech. As for higher-cognitive language functions, word-finding difficulties have been reported, but no study has compared pre- and postoperative word-finding speeds to identify impairment caused by surgery. The current study investigated changes in word-finding ability associated with PFT surgery and examined factors affecting postoperative ability.
We included 184 children aged 5:0-17:9 years undergoing PFT surgery and assessed word-finding ability before and after surgery using a speeded picture-naming test. We compared postoperative word-finding performance with both preoperative performance and age-specific norms and examined factors affecting word-finding ability.
We found no significant difference between pre- and postoperative performance, reflecting that some children exhibited better word-finding ability after surgery, others poorer. After surgery, 95% of the children performed two standard deviations above (slower than) age-specific norms. Tumour location in the fourth ventricle negatively affected postoperative word-finding ability (B = -4.09, p < 0.05).
For some children, PFT surgery leads to postoperative word-finding difficulties, emphasizing the importance of postoperative language assessments and interventions. Fourth-ventricle tumour location emerged as a risk factor for poorer postoperative word-finding ability, likely reflecting surgical damage to the dentato-thalamo-cortical pathway (DTCP).
| URI | Access Rights |
|---|---|
| PubMed | Dokumento santrauka arba dalis / Document Summary or Part |
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00381-025-06787-4 | Viso teksto dokumentas (prieiga prenumeratoriams) / Full Text Document (Access for Subscribers) |
| https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12512/250118 |
| Funding(s) | Grant No |
|---|---|
Lund University | |