Author(s): Nathan Killian
Mentor(s): Jared A. Nielsen, Frederic Schaper
Institution BYU
Acalculia is a neurological condition that affects one’s ability to process numbers and perform calculations. It is characterized by difficulty initiating gait, freezing of gait, and other gait disturbances that cannot be attributed to complications affecting sensory, motor, or cerebellar function, psychiatric disease, nor ataxia. Acalculia symptoms often present following strokes, encephalitis, tumors or acquired brain injuries. Previous research relying only on direct lesion sites has indicated that acalculia may be associated with lesions in the left medial frontal lobe, angular gyrus of the left parietal lobe, . However, the specific cerebral location has been debated with minimal research done on the symptom’s implicated neural circuits. The purpose of this study is to determine the networks in the brain that are involved in the pathophysiology of acalculia. To determine this, we used the lesion network mapping method. A systematic literature review was performed, with specific inclusion criteria, to find case studies of patients presenting with acalculia stemming from acquired brain injury (n=18). Lesion network mapping analysis (Fox et al., 2018) was performed on 18 cases with a large cohort of healthy control resting-state scans (n=1000). This method investigates brain regions functionally connected to the lesion sites rather than the case study lesion sites exclusively.