Verbal Memory in Newly Diagnosed Patients and Patients with Chronic Left Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

The objective of this study was to evaluate verbal memory in newly diagnosed and chronic left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE). Verbal memory performance of 39 newly diagnosed, previously untreated adult patients with LTLE and 16 patients with chronic LTLE, as well as 46 healthy controls, was analyzed. The patients with newly diagnosed and chronic LTLE had impaired verbal memory performance compared with normal controls. Memory performance was more affected in chronic LTLE. However, preliminary data from 5-year follow-up of 20 newly diagnosed LTLE patients did not show any deterioration in verbal memory performance. The memory impairment was not associated with the etiology of epilepsy or the hippocampal volumes, but was associated with early onset of epilepsy in LTLE and with secondarily generalized seizure type in newly diagnosed LTLE. The results of this study show that verbal memory is impaired not only in chronic LTLE but also in newly diagnosed, untreated LTLE. This suggests that the memory problems observed in patients with chronic LTLE cannot be attributed solely to medication effects or the chronic effects of recurrent seizures. (C) 2001 Academic Press