The article presents the results of the study of clinical characteristics and the measures of cognitive functioning in patients with ischemic heart disease after coronary bypass surgery. It focuses on the measures potentially significant for the return to work during the long-term postoperative period, such as active attention and mental capacity, memory, verbal, logical and spatial reasoning, as well as neuropsychological characteristics of visual recognition of fragmented images. An attempt to stress out the most significant measures that could help to distinguish between the patients more and less likely to return to work even before surgery was made.