Linguistic conditions included semantically irreversible (“”The boy is eating the apple”") and reversible (“”The boy is pushing the girl”") sentences at three levels of syntactic complexity. As expected, patients performed well above chance on irreversible sentences, and at chance on reversible sentences of high complexity. Comprehension of reversible non-complex sentences ranged from nearly

perfect to chance, and was highly correlated with offline measures of language comprehension. Lesion analysis revealed that comprehension deficits for reversible sentences were predicted by damage to the left temporal lobe. Although aphasic patients activated homologous areas in the right temporal lobe, such activation was not correlated with comprehension performance. Rather, patients

with better comprehension exhibited increased activity in dorsal fronto-parietal Selisistat mouse regions. Correlations between performance and dorsal network activity occurred bilaterally during perception of sentences, and in the right hemisphere during a post-sentence click here memory delay. These results suggest that effortful reprocessing of perceived sentences in short-term memory can support improved comprehension in aphasia, and that strategic recruitment of alternative networks, rather than homologous takeover, may account for some findings of right hemisphere language activation in aphasia. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.”
“Introduction: Although carotid artery stenosis and coronary artery disease often coexist, many debate which patients are best served by combined concurrent revascularization (carotid endarterectomy [CEA]/coronary artery bypass graft [CABG]). We studied the use

of CEA/CABG in New England and compared indications and outcomes, including stratification by risk, symptoms, and performing center.

Methods: Using data from the Vascular Study Group of New England from 2003 to 2009, we studied all patients who underwent combined CEA/CABG across six centers in New England. Our main outcome measure was in-hospital stroke or death. We compared outcomes between all patients undergoing combined CEA/CABG to AZD9291 concentration a baseline CEA risk group comprised of patients undergoing isolated CEA at non-CEA/CABG centers. Further, we compared in-hospital stroke and death rates between high and low neurologic risk patients, defining high neurologic risk patients as those who had at least one of the following clinical or anatomic features: (1) symptomatic carotid disease, (2) bilateral carotid stenosis >70%, (3) ipsilateral stenosis >70% and contralateral occlusion, or (4) ipsilateral or bilateral occlusion.

Results: Overall, compared to patients undergoing isolated CEA at non-CEA/CABG centers (n = 1563), patients undergoing CEA/CABG (n = 109) were more likely to have diabetes (44% vs 29%; P = .001), creatinine >1.8 mg/dL (11% vs 5%; P = .