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Query: UMLS:C0018991 (hemiplegia)
 3,997 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

A theory is proposed to account for unawareness of blindness, hemianopsia, and hemiplegia, and for phantom limb after amputation. It is assumed that interruption of a sensory pathway at any level--from peripheral nerve to primary sensory cortex--is not associated with any immediate sensory experience that uniquely specifies the defect. Instead the sensory loss must be discovered by a process of self-observation and inference. Discovery is easy for defects that create major functional disability, such as total blindness. Hence unawareness of total blindness occurs only in association with severe intellectual impairment, precluding the required self-observation and inference. In contrast, hemianopsia is difficult to discover because several mechanisms automatically compensate the defect effectively. Thus unawareness of hemianopsia is common, even in intellectually normal individuals. Insensate fields are often the source of suggested (false) percepts, because no information from such a field specifies the absence of a sensory stimulus. The most powerful source of suggestion is sensory activity in uninvolved portions of the affected sensory field. Thus hemianopsics may perceive complete geometric forms when only incomplete forms are shown and the missing portion falls in the hemianopsic fields. Such perceptual completion also occurs in hemianesthetic hemiplegics, creating the illusion that there are normally functioning limbs on the affected side. This perceptual completion increases the difficulty of discovery of hemianesthetic hemiplegia, but the disability is still sufficiently obvious that some additional cognitive impairment is invariably present in patients with lasting unawareness of hemiplegia. Phantom limb after amputation is the product of perceptual completion without associated cognitive impairment. The patient with phantom limb is thus aware of the illusory quality of his phantom. Some insight into the neural basis of perceptual completion and of unawareness of sensory loss may derive from considering sensory systems and associative cortex as parallel-distributed processing mechanisms.
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PMID:Unawareness of visual and sensorimotor defects: a hypothesis. 239 Feb 36

A case of supernumerary phantom limb is described after a haematoma within the right basal ganglia. The phantom, which persisted for many months, occurred in the context of severe left hemiplegia, sensory loss, hemianopia, and neglect. The subjective reality of this "third arm" caused the patient considerable distress, which was not ameliorated by his attempts to rationalise its existence. Although deeply confused by the phantom, the patient was otherwise fully oriented, with a high verbal IQ, and normal cognition. Two distinct formal interpretations of the phenomenon are discussed.
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PMID:Three arms: a case study of supernumerary phantom limb after right hemisphere stroke. 1096 Feb 88

Following a right capsulo-lenticular hematoma, a 35-year-old man developed left sensory motor hemiplegia. Three years later, he still describes the existence of a supernumerary phantom limb. Mood disturbances, hypersexuality and attentional left hemineglect were also present.
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PMID:[Hallucinations of supernumerary limbs, left hemineglect and hypersexuality in a case of right capsulo-lenticular hematoma]. 968 23

We describe a case of a brain-damaged patient who had a peculiar bodily illusion which could not be labelled an hallucination but seemed somatognosically and phenomenologically similar to the phantom limb without amputation. The patient, who showed left hemiplegia, felt a third upper limb (without seeing it) which he himself defined as "spare." The spare limb was not deformed; it could be moved and controlled by the patient, and there was no sensation of pain. The patient did not show psychopathological or cognitive disorders. A possible interpretation of the phenomenon is as a "phantom movement" of the paralysed limb: the mental representation of the movement of the limb was dissociated from the bodily representation of his own limb and so was still present in his consciousness despite the paralysis.
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PMID:On the syndrome of the "spare limb": one case. 1460 17

The body scheme is a complex of memory patterns secured in the structures of the brain, where the parietal lobes play the most important role. Basic principles are given by the genetic programming of the structure and function along with the synthesis of information brought by means of sensory activity. The unitary perception of the body scheme is a dynamic image, enabling conscious and unconscious representation of our body, its parts, their functions, position, shape and/or movements. The recognition of the body scheme in humans is named somatognosia. Disorders of somatognosia include visceral and somatic phantom, phantom pain and other disorders related to the capability of communication by means of language: autotopoagnosia, hemiasomatognosia, pain asymboly, anosognosia of hemiplegia, anosognosia of blindness, deafness, neglect and other defects appearing at the neurologist's and psychiatrist's borderline of interest. Interest in the visceral phantom is usually much smaller than that in the phantom limb. The aim of this paper was to draw the to phantom phenomena in patients following rectum amputation and colostomy. A survey of contemporary knowledge about the body scheme and its disorders, cortical plasticity and the problem of cortical maladaptation are presented.
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PMID:[Somatognosis, body schema and the phenomena of somatic and visceral phantoms and phantom pain]. 1292 31

A recently published case report of a supernumerary phantom limb in a man with left-sided hemiplegia did not take note that this phenomenon has been extensively documented in the neurological literature for well over 100 years. The present comment provides a brief introduction to the clinical and experimental approaches to supernumerary phantom limbs. It also emphasizes the theoretical importance of this condition for understanding the neurological mechanisms subserving the experience of having a body.
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PMID:Supernumerary phantoms: a comment on Grossi, et al.'s (2002) spare thoughts on spare limbs. 1202 41

The sense of embodiment is vital for self recognition. An examination of anosognosia for hemiplegia--the inability to recognise that one is paralysed down one side of one's body--suggests the existence of 'online' and 'offline' representations of the body. Online representations of the body are representations of the body as it is currently, are newly constructed moment by moment and are directly "plugged into" current perception of the body. In contrast, offline representations of the body are representations of what the body is usually like, are relatively stable and are constructed from online representations. This distinction is supported by an analysis of phantom limb--the feeling that an amputated limb is still present--phenomena. Initially it seems that the sense of embodiment may arise from either of these types of representation; however, an integrated representation of the body seems to be required. It is suggested information from vision and emotions is involved in generating these representations. A lack of access to online representations of the body does not necessarily lead to a loss in the sense of embodiment. An integrated offline representation of the body could account for the sense of embodiment and perform the functions attributed to this sense.
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PMID:Types of body representation and the sense of embodiment. 1872 92