Background and Aim: Stroke is the third leading cause of death, second cause of long-term disability and one of the very important challenging in life. The aim of this research was to explain the barriers and facilitating factors affected on stroke patients' life, and to identify relationship among them with demographic factors and severity of disease.
Materials and methods: The descriptive-analytic technique was used. All patients who suffered from stroke were recruited in Kerman city. Finally 83 patients were selected, and data were gathered by demographic qualification questionnaire, proven questionnaire by researcher for studying barriers and facilitating factors (after testing validity and reliability), and NIHSS tools . Then, data were analyzed by using descriptive and referential statistics ANOVA test, T-Test, and Pearson coefficient correlation by SPSS software (ver. 16).
Results: The findings showed that patients had more problems in the domains of politics, environmental factors, physical, and economic status. Also, they introduced social support from friends, family and prayer as facilitating factors in their lives. There was a significant positive relationship between age and physical and economical problems. Women have used social support and religious coping more than men.  Married patients received more social support and their physical and economic problems raised less.
Conclusion: Patients with higher severity of disease had more psychological problems such as depression and worry about future and Patients with lower socio-economic status more faced with barriers.

Back ground and Aim: Some left brain- damaged stroke patients display both oral and verbal apraxia, while others may appear to have one or none of them. So the present study was focused on investigating the severity and relationship of oral and verbal apraxia in these patients.

Materials and Methods: In this cross sectional descriptive-analytic study, 20 left hemisphere damaged patients due to a single ischemic CVA (8 women, 12 men) with an average age of 60.68 years (range, 35-73) were recruited using convenience sampling. An oral apraxia task was applied to examine imitation of oral motor gestures, and the verbal apraxia was tested by a speech production task. Data were analyzed by U Mann-Whitney, Kruskal-Wallis and Pearson correlation.

Results: Analysis of data revealed that 4 patients showed prominent oral apraxia, 12 patients suffered from prominent verbal apraxia and 4 had a combination of both types with relative equal severities. No significant correlation between oral apraxia and verbal apraxia was observed (p= 0.899).

Conclusion: According to the findings, the co-occurrence pattern of oral and verbal apraxia seems not to be a predictable one. Despite of the fact that ischemic lesions lead to damage of neighboring neural substrates, half of the patients revealed dissociation of oral and verbal apraxia. This dissociation may be interpreted as an evidence of a modular task-specific neuromotor control system , which considers non-speech oral movement control independent of speech motor control .

Key words: Apraxia, Oral apraxia, Verbal apraxia, oral apraxia prominence, Verbal apraxia prominence

Background and Aim: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation is a novel technique for inhibition or excitation of brain cortical area. Dichotic listening test is a simple instrument to determine dominant ear and brain hemisphere for processing of verbal stimuli. This study aimed to determine changes in right ear advantage(REA), after applying inhibitory rTMS protocol on left Broca area.

Materials and Methods: In this descriptive - cross-sectional study, we compared the performances of 14 right handed normal adult Persian speakers with normal auditory and no history of psychiatric or neurological disorders. TMS was applied at 1 Hz with 90% motor threshold, for 10 minutes (600 pulses) on left Broca's area. The right ear advantage index was assessed pre and post rTMS using dichotic listening test.

Results: Finding of the present study showed no significant difference on right ear advantage index pre and post rTMS using paired t-test.

Conclusion: According to the findings of this study, it can be concluded that the use of inhibitory rTMS protocol on the left Broca area , has no effect for shifting in the right ear advantage. For interpretation of the results, it could be stated that it may be the protocol was used in this study isn't sufficient enough to inhibit left hemisphere for linguistic processing. Another reason could be the lack of sufficient sensitivity of Dichotic Listening test to show changes in hemisphere function after TMS. However, to provide clearer description, using functional brain imaging techniques and TMS together could be helpful.

Key words: Trancranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), Lateralization, REA, Linguistic processing, Dichotic listening