Cognitive profiles and subtypes of epilepsy

Abstract

Three subtypes of people with epilepsy were being evaluated: generalized seizures (GS), complex partial seizures (CPS) with temporal lobe origin, mixed type of seizures (MS) together with normal control with respect to attention, memory, frontal fluency, and cognitive processing speed. Fortyfive patients and 15 normal control from Queen Elizabeth Hospital were invited to participate in this study. All test measures were chosen to tap the 4 cognitive domains. Results showed that simple attention span and selective attention were not being affected in clinical groups while sustained attention was impaired. The impairment was particularly greater in the MS group. The MS group also showed greater deficit in both verbal and nonverbal memory indicating that the mixed pathology of this group affected the functioning most. Word Frontal fluency was significantly affected in both MS and CPS groups while there was no impact on design fluency in all groups. This indicated that the temporal lobe pathology of MS and CPS do play a role in affecting the word fluency ability. Concerning the cognitive processing speed, MS and CPS groups also showed significant difficulties. The findings document deficits in attention as well as memory, verbal fluency, and cognitive processing speed in the group of mixed types of seizure while for other seizure groups, the impairment depends on their location being affected.