Hemineglect: Patients For Whom The Left Side Does Not Exist
Hemineglect, or unilateral spatial negligence, is a neurological disorder that expresses itself in a very strange way in patients who suffer from it. Specifically, it makes the person, apparently maintaining a normal degree of consciousness, unable to recognize stimuli that come from one of the sides of their body.
In this article you can see the symptoms associated with hemineglect, its possible causes and treatments related to appropriate medical intervention for this type of patient.
Hemineglect can refer to two similar phenomena. On the one hand, can be used to refer to a symptom and on the other hand it is also possible to use it as equivalent to the name “unilateral neglect syndrome”, which is the neurological disorder to which the symptom corresponds.
As a symptom, hemineglect is the inability to consciously notice elements that arrive from one of the sides with respect to the axis that crosses one’s own body from the forehead to the back of the neck.
On the other hand, unilateral neglect syndrome is the clinical picture of a person who apparently does not pay attention to anything that is located on one of his sides (or, in a more technical way, one of his hemibodies), which means that does not even consciously perceive it nor does it perform actions located in that half of the hemibody
For example, a person with hemineglect will not be able to notice a dog that is located to the left of his field of vision, but he will not be able to shave his beard completely either: he will only shave half of his face.
On the other hand, if a careless person is asked to draw a square as he sees it, he will only draw half, but if he changes his position and starts looking at it from the opposite side to the previous one, he will draw the half he sees. had been omitted and not the other.
The clock test to detect this syndrome
Thus, one of the typical tests used in clinics to find out if a person has hemineglect consists of asking him to draw a clock If you suffer from this syndrome, you will only draw one of the halves, and the other will either not be drawn or will appear clearly “atrophied.”
Usually, The hemibody that is “ignored” by people with hemineglect is the left so the clock will be drawn in such a way that the hand cannot go beyond 6 or 7 o’clock.
Symptoms
Some of the typical symptoms of spatial neglect syndrome are the following:
Causes of unilateral spatial neglect
The most frequent causes of hemineglect are usually ischemic accidents that leave certain parts of the brain without blood circulation and kill the neurons in that area. So that, cerebral infarction is usually in the medical history of this type of patients.
It’s an attention problem
Although hemineglect seems to be a problem that leaves one of the halves of the body (and the visual field) completely ignored, the truth is that it is fundamentally an attention problem that affects the information that arrives from one of the hemibodies. This is known because, at an unconscious level, it has been seen that people who have this neurological condition They do react to stimuli captured only from the affected side
For example, if you show them a drawing of a house whose left side is on fire, they will claim to see a normal house. However, if they are asked to select certain words right after, they tend to choose those related to the semantic field of fire and fires.
Furthermore, if they are presented a photograph of two people with a friend or family member on the left they will say they do not see anyone they know, but the parts of the brain that are activated when seeing something familiar will be activated, something that will not happen when presented with two photographs of unknown people.
Hemineglect causes the perception of information that comes from the left (normally) to be masked, but that does not mean that it does not exist in any degree of intensity. It is not about “blindness” to one half of the body.
Treatments
Typically, the illness that causes hemineglect is severe enough that This disorder will never completely disappear although it may improve a little over time, due to neuronal plasticity.
For this reason, the treatments used are palliative, related to learning methods to lead a day to day life as normal as possible. Of course, they will almost always need regular assistance.
