title: Preoperative assessment of confrontation naming ability and interictal paraphasia production in unilateral temporal lobe epilepsy.
abstract: The present study examined the diagnostic utility of confrontation naming tasks and phonemic paraphasia production in lateralizing the epileptogenic region in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Further, the role of intelligence in moderating the diagnostic utility of confrontation naming tasks was assessed. Eighty patients with medically intractable complex partial seizures (40 left TLE, 40 right TLE) received the Boston Naming Test (BNT) and the Visual Naming subtest (VNT) of the Multilingual Aphasia Examination. The BNT was diagnostically more sensitive than the VNT in identifying left TLE (77.5% vs 17.5%, respectively). The utility of BNT performance and paraphasias was maximal in patients with Full Scale IQs >or=90 who were 6.8 times more likely to have left TLE than patients without paraphasias. Preoperative assessment of confrontation naming ability and phonemic paraphasia production using the BNT provided diagnostically useful information in lateralizing the epileptogenic region in left TLE.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA. schefftbk@email.uc.edu
authors.forename: Bruce K
authors.initials: BK
authors.lastname: Schefft
authors.forename: S Marc
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Testa
authors.forename: Mario F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Dulay
authors.forename: Michael D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Privitera
authors.forename: Hwa-Shain
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Yeh
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001037:Aphasia / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000209:etiology*; D004569:Electroencephalography; D004833:Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / Q000150:complications* / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000601:surgery*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011300:Preoperative Care; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014825:Vocabulary; D014888:Wechsler Scales