RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Interictal language functions in temporal lobe epilepsy
JF Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry
JO J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry
FD BMJ Publishing Group Ltd
SP 808
OP 814
DO 10.1136/jnnp.2004.045385
VO 76
IS 6
A1 L Bartha
A1 T Benke
A1 G Bauer
A1 E Trinka
YR 2005
UL http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/76/6/808.abstract
AB Objective: To evaluate interictal language functions in patients with medically intractable left and right sided mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Methods: Spontaneous speech, language comprehension, confrontation naming, repetition, reading, writing, and word fluency were examined in 12 patients with left sided TLE and 11 patients with right sided TLE. Results: Four patients out of 23 displayed language deficits in more than one language domain. Three further patients exhibited isolated language deficits. Linguistic deficits were observed in both left TLE and right TLE. In quantitative analyses left and right TLE only differed in spontaneous speech (p = 0.02); no difference was found in other language functions, laterality quotient of Wada test, or overall IQ. Qualitative error analysis of object naming, however, showed typical errors associated only with left TLE. Patients with linguistic deficits were older at testing compared to patients without linguistic deficits (p = 0.003), whereas other factors including side of TLE, handedness, educational level, age at epilepsy onset, and duration of epilepsy did not differ between groups. Conclusions: Possible explanations for these findings include neuronal cell loss and deafferentiation in cortical areas, and disruption of the basal temporal language area pathways. Our study suggests that some patients with chronic mesial TLE exhibit linguistic deficits when specifically tested, and underlines the need to routinely investigate linguistic functions in TLE.