Browse the corpus

Evaluation of Executive Functions in Children with Rheumatic Heart Diseases. BACKGROUND: Acute rheumatic fever (ARF) is a multisystemic inflammatory disease in children and young adults. The most notable complications of ARF are rheumatic heart disease (RHD) and sydenham's chorea (SC). There have been a lot of report about executive dysfunctions with children who have SC. Executive functions is an umbrella term that is used to describe higher-level cognitive functions. The aim of this study is to determine the executive functions of children with RHD. We evaluated executive functions in healthy children with the same sociodemographic characteristics as children with RHD. METHODS: Our study was designed as a cross-sectional randomized study, including children with RHD aged between 12-18 and healthy controls. The difference between the patient and control group participants in terms of age, gender, education level, education level of the parents, family income level, and executive functions was investigated in our study. Executive functions including that Digit Sequence Test, Verbal Fluency Test, Trail Making Test, Stroop Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. RESULTS: 30 cases control and RHD group were included in our study. The mean age of the case group was 14.73 ± 1.84 years. In our study, no statistically significant difference was found between the patient and control patients when the Digit Span Test, Verbal Fluency Test, Trail Making Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and Stroop test had been done. CONCLUSION: In our study, no statistically significant difference was found between the patient and control patients in all of the executive function tests. Thus, It was suggested that executive dysfunction might not develop in RHD patients before developing SC.