title: Executive functioning in children with intractable frontal lobe or temporal lobe epilepsy.
abstract: The aim of the present study was to shed light on the executive functioning deficits that might differentiate children with frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE) from children with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Participants included 19 youth with intractable FLE and 47 youth with intractable TLE. Participants completed the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), verbal fluency, Trail Making Test (Trails A and B), Digit Span Forward (DSF), and Digit Span Backward (DSB). When compared to the normative sample, the FLE group performed significantly worse on DSF, DSB, Trails B, and the WCST. Similarly, the TLE group performed significantly worse on DSF and DSB compared to the normative sample. Youth with FLE had significantly greater difficulty on the WCST compared to the TLE group. Overall, the results indicated that youth with FLE had significantly greater difficulty with concept formation compared to children with TLE. No differences between groups emerged on tasks assessing attention, working memory, mental flexibility, or rapid word retrieval. Both groups performed significantly below the normative sample levels on attention and working memory tasks. As a whole, it appears that some, although not all, executive dysfunction is specific to FLE.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 1X8.
authors.forename: Carmelinda A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Longo
authors.forename: Elizabeth N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.forename: Mary Lou
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D017668:Age of Onset; D000927:Anticonvulsants / Q000627:therapeutic use; D001245:Association Learning / Q000502:physiology; D002648:Child; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D017034:Epilepsy, Frontal Lobe / Q000150:complications* / Q000188:drug therapy; D004833:Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / Q000150:complications* / Q000188:drug therapy; D056344:Executive Function / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D012016:Reference Values
chemical_list: D000927:Anticonvulsants