The paper presents the results of an investigation of clinical characteristics and indicators of cognitive
functioning (indicators of active attention and mental capacity, memory, verbal-logical and spatial
thinking, as well as neuropsychological indicators of visual recognition of fragmented images), which are
potentially significant for the resumption of work in the late postoperative period of patients with
coronary heart disease (CHD), undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). An attempt has been
made to extract from the whole mass of the data obtained the most prognostically significant, which will
allow to differentiate patients at the stage of preparation for CABG to those who will be able to continue
working after the operation, and those who are more likely not able to return to work.
The present study enrolled 118 patients (of average age 59.71 ± 7.32 years) who underwent coronary
artery bypass grafting with standard cardiopulmonary bypass technique. The examination using a
neuropsychological test battery (including WAIS, TMT-test, Stroop test, TAS, Benton test, etc.) was
performed in three stages: two days before CABG, 12-14 days and three months after the surgery.
Patients with CHD experience significant postoperative cognitive decline mostly in verbal memory and
attention, while positive dynamics was observed in the visual and logical memory, as well as in spatial
and verbal-logical thinking. Using factor analysis we identified 4 factors of cognitive functioning, which
were called verbal memory, thinking, cognitive control and visual recognition. As a result of the study of
indicators of cognitive functioning, which are potentially significant for the resumption of work in the late
postoperative period, we constructed a model, according to which the accuracy of prediction of belonging
to the "working" group and to the group of "nonworkers" in the remote postoperative period is 83.9% (the
significance of the canonical function obtained is p = 0.000066). It was shown that the return to work in
the long-term postoperative period is more typical for younger people who have lower indicators of the
factors "Verbal memory" and "Thinking" before the operation and higher indicators of the factors "Verbal
memory" and "Cognitive control" in the second and third stages of the study.