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Updated: Jun 14, 2026

Assessment of Cerebral Lateralization in Children using Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound (fTCD)
Published on: September 27, 2010
Lateralization of cognitive functions after stroke in childhood
Regula Everts1, Karen Lidzba, Marko Wilke
1Paediatric Neurology, University Children's Hospital, Inselspital, Bern, Switzerland. regula@everts.ch
Rationale:
A child's brain shows a remarkable ability to recover from adverse events such as stroke. Language functions recover particularly well, while visuo-spatial skills are more affected by brain damage, regardless of its localization. This study investigated the lateralization of language and visual search after childhood stroke.
Methods:
Ten patients with unilateral stroke (aged 10-19 years, five left-, five right-sided lesion) and 20 healthy controls (aged 8-20 years) completed a neuropsychological test battery and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) intended to activate predominantly right (visual search) and left-sided functional networks (language).
Results:
After stroke, patients demonstrated atypical lateralization of visual search functions (8/10 patients, left lateralization) more often than that of language (4/10 patients, right lateralization). There was a dissociation between the lateralization of productive and semantic language (4/10 patients, 1/20 controls) and between the lateralization of simple and complex visual search (3/10 patients, 3/20 controls). In patients, atypical contralateral activations occurred in the same areas that showed decreasing activation during development in healthy participants.
Conclusion:
The lateralization of functions depends upon the cognitive function measured. Dissociation between the lateralization of different language or visual search tasks can occur.
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