An exploratory comparison of three methods of memory assessment with the intracarotid amobarbital procedure

This paper has two objectives. The first is to compare three methods of amobarbital memory assessment in 172 adults prior to epilepsy surgery. The three methods are significantly different from one another and there was only a moderate degree of concordance between them; concordance depended upon the method, the side of surgery, and the side of speech. The second objective of the paper is to evaluate the relative abilities of the methods to differentiate, prior to surgery, patients who did and who did not suffer mild to moderate postoperative losses in verbal memory following surgery. To meet this objective, a subsample of patients was selected based on the presence or absence of this type of memory loss. Significant differences in the ability of the amobarbital methods to identify the patients at risk for postoperative memory loss were observed, with the method assessing recall memory during drug presence having the best prediction rate. (C) 1997 Academic Press.