THE UTILITY OF THE RIGHT-HEMISPHERE LANGUAGE BATTERY IN PATIENTS WITHBRAIN-TUMORS

The Right Hemisphere Language Battery (RHLB) (Bryan, 1989) was devised to assess the presence of language disorders in patients with damage to the right cerebral hemisphere and to permit an evaluation of the ef ficacy of therapeutic techniques. To evaluate the utility and sensitiv ity of the RHLB in patients with solitary right hemispheric brain tumo urs 20 patients were assessed before and after neurosurgery. Twenty co ntrol subjects with no signs or symptoms of brain disease who were und ergoing lumbar spinal surgery were also assessed On six of the seven R HLB subtests there war no significant difference between the scores ob tained preoperatively by patients with right hemispheric brain tumours and the control subjects. There war also no significant change in the scores of the patients with tumours before and after resection of the lesion. The RHLB is therefore not recommended for either evaluating c ommunication deficits or for measuring the efficacy of therapeutic tec hniques in patients with right hemisphere brain tumours. This study do es, however, show that there are statistically significant differences between the control and brain tumour groups on the discourse analysis subtest preoperatively. The implications of the study are discussed t ogether with possible reasons for the findings.