CVA Terminology

A

  • Accommodation – the eye’s ability to adjust to various distances in the environment
  • Acuity – visual sharpness
  • Adaptation – coping with the changes of task demands
  • Adhesive capsulitis – frozen shoulder
  • Adjustment to disability – a psychosocial condition in which the client faces barriers to the acceptance of their disability
  • Agraphia – acquired writing disturbance
  • Anarthria – speech impairment resulting in the absence of speech
  • Ankle strategy – autonomic postural responses to maintain balance using the ankles
  • Anomia – inability to name things
  • Anosognosia – poor insight or denial of one’s own disabilities
  • Aphasia  – communication deficit resulting in the loss of the ability to speak or understand language
  • Aprosody – difficulty expressing and recognizing social emotions
  • Astereognosis – the inability to recognize things using touch; tactile agnosia

B

  • Blocked practice – practice using drills with numerous repetitions
  • Broca’s aphasia – non-fluent expression affecting speech

C

  • Cognitive Orientation to Daily Occupational Performance model – a client-centered meta-cognitive approach with collaboration, goal setting, performance analysis, cognitive strategies, and guided discovery to promote generalization and transfer
  • Color agnosia – inability to name or recognize colors
  • Concrete thinking – inflexible thinking
  • Confrontation – movement of an object through the client’s visual field
  • Convergence – coordinated eye movement inwards to focus on an object
  • Cortical blindness – blindness resulting from a lesson in the cerebral cortex

D

  • Dissociation – separation of body parts during movement patterns
  • Divergence – eye movement outwards
  • Environmental control unit – a device used to interact with the environment

F

  • Far transfer  – introducing an activity of the same context but different from the initial task performed

G

  • Global aphasia – severely impaired language

H

  • Hemianopsia – visual field deficit (blindness) in half of the visual field
  • Heterotopic ossification – overgrowth or deposit of bone in soft tissues which may affect movement
  • Hyperopia – farsightedness

I

  • Ideational apraxia – inability to perform a task due to loss of a model or mental representation of the procedure
  • Intermediate transfer – changing a number of task parameters while keeping familiar initial task parameters
  • Ipsilateral pushing – a stroke syndrome characterized by physically pushing the body towards one side due to misperceived center of gravity and midline

L

  • Learned nonuse – lack of use of a body part resulting from stroke and its diminished perception of function

M

  • Motor adaptation – ability to adapt to postural responses to environmental demands and task changes
  • Motor apraxia – inability to perform purposeful movements due to impaired planning and sequencing of movements
  • Myopia – nearsightedness

N

  • Near transfer – performing an alternate form of the initial task
  • Neoplasm – abnormal tissue growth; tumor
  • NPO – nothing by mouth

O

  • Organization – ability to organize thoughts to perform a task in an organized manner with proper sequencing and timing

P

  • Praxis – ideation; planning purposeful movements
  • Procedural memory – recalling the steps of a task
  • Prosopagnosia – the inability to recognize familiar faces

S

  • Saccadic eye movements – fast, voluntary, and coordinated movements of the eyes to fixate back and fourth on two points at a distance
  • Shoulder-hand syndrome – a type of CRPS that involves pain, stiffness, swelling, and reduced function of the upper limb
  • Somatoagnosia – body scheme disorder characterized by decreased awareness of body structure and recognition of one’s own body parts and their relationship to each other
  • Spasticity – hypertonus and hyperactive stretch reflexes
  • Strabismus – inabilty of eyes to cross axes due to imbalanced eye muscles; impaired saccades

T

  • Tonic arousal – change in muscle tone and response when a person wakens
  • Topographic orientation – difficulty finding one’s way in space due to cognitive problems
  • Trendelenberg sign – when one stands on the affected limb and the opposite gluteal fold falls

U

  • Unilateral body neglect – forgetting about one side of the body due to stroke

W

  • Wallenberg sign – Horner syndrome, cerebellar ataxia and contralateral loss of pain and temperature
  • Wernicke’s aphasia – reduced speech comprehension

References

Gillen, G. (2015). Stroke rehabilitation: a function-based approach. Elsevier Health Sciences.