Neuropsychological functioning in HIV-positive African-American women with a history of drug use.

This preliminary investigation examined neuropsychological performance in a sample of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-positive and HIV-negative African-American women with a history of drug use. The study population was comprised of 10 HIV-negative, 9 asymptomatic HIV-positive, 13 symptomatic HIV-positive, and 10 acquired immunodeficiency virus (AIDS) patients. A neuropsychological battery designed to assess attention, psychomotor processing, verbal memory, and visual memory was administered to participants. No evidence of HIV-related cognitive impairment was found in patients in the early stages of HIV infection. Multivariate analyses of variance revealed significant deficits in psychomotor processing and verbal recall in persons with AIDS. These individuals showed greater difficulty in tasks requiring maintained attention and performed poorly on measures of immediate and delayed verbal recall. In contrast, HIV status was not related to visual memory, verbal recognition, or the number of errors made during a verbal recall task. The pattern of cognitive deficits observed in persons with AIDS resembles that commonly associated with subcortical pathology. The cognitive deficits observed were not related to depression or recentness of drug use.

Visual organization test performance in an African American population with acute unilateral cerebral lesions.

Controversy abounds as to whether the Hooper Visual Organization Test (VOT) is a measure of hemisphere-specific, region-specific, or non-specific brain damage. The present study examines this issue in a group of African Americans with acute unilateral brain damage and non-brain-injured controls. Consistent with the idea that the VOT is a measure of "organic" cerebral pathology, non-brain damaged controls earned significantly higher VOT scores than brain-damaged patients. While other studies have noted that the VOT is primarily sensitive to damage in the right parietal region of the brain, the present study shows that VOT performance is especially vulnerable to acute lesions in the right anterior quadrant of the brain. This latter finding supports the idea that VOT performance is differentially sensitive to regional cerebral pathology, but challenges the region specific claim of poorer VOT performance among patients with right posterior cerebral damage.