Abstracts

Interictal Perceptual Disturbances in Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Abstract number : 1.196
Submission category : Neuropsychology/Language Cognition-Adult
Year : 2006
Submission ID : 6330
Source : www.aesnet.org
Presentation date : 12/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
Published date : Nov 30, 2006, 06:00 AM

Authors :
Arthur C. Grant, Kiely M. Donnelly, William B. Barr, Ruben Kuzniecky, and Orrin Devinsky

Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is associated with abnormal neuronal function distant from the seizure focus. Neuronal dysfunction may correlate with interictal cognitive abnormalities. Cognitive assessment in TLE has focused largely on high-level tests of language and memory., We administered a battery of [quot]low-level[quot] psychophysical perceptual tasks to 20 patients with medically uncontrolled TLE and 20 neurologically normal controls of similar age and education. All tasks were quantitative and unimodal measures of vision, audition, or somatic sensation. Among other tests, amplitude discrimination was determined in all three sensory modalities. Both long and short stimuli were used, to assess the significance of information redundancy on task performance., TLE subjects performed significantly worse than controls on a tactile vibratory amplitude discrimination task, and the performance differential was relatively greater at shorter stimulus durations. TLE subjects performed worse than controls on all visual paradigms, though these differences did not always reach statistical significance. In the auditory domain, TLE subjects performed worse than controls on some tests, but better than controls on others. Again, some of these group performance differences reached statistical significance., When compared to neurologically normal controls, patients with intractable TLE demonstrated a range of abilities on a large battery of psychophysical perceptual tasks. Such low-level and unimodal perceptual tests may provide a unique measure of interictal cognitive function in TLE, particularly functions that depend largely on extratemporal structures., (Supported by NIH K23 NS46347 and NIH GCRC program M01 RR00096.)
Behavior/Neuropsychology