Twenty years ago, a rehabilitation team examined the cognitive function of 14 patients with lower-limb amputation secondary to peripheral vascular disease (PVD) and compared its observations against the cognitive performance of 14 able-bodied, matched controls. Participants with amputation had significantly slower psychomotor speed, poorer problem-solving ability, and more compromised abstract-reasoning skills than the healthy controls. There were additional trends toward poorer performance on measures of visuospatial skills, concentration, and oral fluency among the amputee cohort.1 These were among the earliest observations to support the notion that the same factors that might lead to a lower-limb vascular amputation might also contribute to some level of cognitive compromise.
