[Neuropsychology of temporal partial epilepsy: a comparison of drug resistant and pharmacologically controlled patients].
BACKGROUND
Various factors may contribute to cognitive deterioration in temporal lobe epilepsy, and there is controversy as to which has the greatest effect.


METHODS
In this study, we establish a comparison between patients with temporal lobe epilepsy controlled by drugs and drug-resistant patients, with the object of discovering the effect of different factors in causing cognitive damage.


RESULTS
The persons whose disorder was controlled by pharmacological means had better results in memory and intelligence tests than those with drug-resistance. The latter had alterations of declarative memory for verbal material (left) and for visio-spatial material (right) in delayed free recall tests. Also, the greater proportion of symptomatic epilepsies in the drug-resistant group affected their greater cognitive deterioration.


CONCLUSIONS
Our results show that having long-standing epilepsy with great frequency of seizures and symptomatic epilepsy is correlated with cognitive alterations in memory function in temporal lobe epilepsy. Most deterioration is seen in patients with long-standing drug resistant symptomatic left mesial temporal epilepsy.
Maestú
F
F
Unidad de Cirugía de la Epilepsia, Hospital de la Princesa, Madrid, España.
Martín
P
P
de Sola
R G
RG
Obregón
M C
MC
Gómez-Utrero
E
E
Fernandez
A
A
Sánchez
A
A
Paúl
N
N
Ortiz
T
T
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000209:etiology; D004351:Drug Resistance; D004833:Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence; D007361:Intelligence Tests; D008568:Memory; D008875:Middle Aged; D009484:Neuropsychology