Almost five decades have passed since open-heart surgery was used as a method for improving coronary arteries. The research carried out in the past has shown the emergence of cognitive impairment and/or cognitive dysfunction in many patients after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG), but more recent research mentions a minor dysfunction after surgery and the reason for this difference is considered to be the advances in anesthetic and surgical techniques, differences in methodologies, or the precision of the applied neuropsychological instruments. In the present research we have specifically examined attention in its selective, shifting, and sustained dimensions in order to determine the effect of CABG on these variables. Attention was assessed by comparing two groups of 30 patients with coronary artery disease. One of the two groups underwent surgery while the control group was on the waiting list. Thus, the methodology of the present research is pretest-posttest with a control group. The instruments include Stroop test for assessing selective attention, SAT for shifting attention, and CPT for sustained attention. The first group performed the neuropsychological tests one month after surgery, and the control group performed them once when they were admitted and a month later when they were hospitalized. Mann-Whitney U test was applied for data analysis. The results showed that there is no significant difference between the two groups in any of the tests, though considerable differences were observed in comparing the means of the two groups.
