CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY IN DRUG RESISTANT EPILEPSY PATIENTS Munera CP1,2, Lomlomdjian C1,2, Solis P1,2, Medel N1,2, Terpiluk V1, Valeriano L1, Kochen S1,2 1Epilepsy Center, Neurology Division, Hospital Ramos Mejia, Caba, Argentina, 2IBCN Epilepsy Laboratory, CONICET, Faculty of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires, Caba, Argentina Purpose: To identify the characteristic features of autobiographical memory (AM) in a population of patients with temporal and extratemporal epilepsy in surgical candidates. Method: Twenty patients were evaluated (15 male, age mean 31.50 years, years of education mean 10.9 years, IQ mean 87). Sixteen patients had temporal lobe epilepsy (12 left, 7 right and 1 bilateral) and 4 had extratemporal lobe epilepsy. Epilepsy onset age mean 9 years. AMwas assessed with the Autobiographical Interview (Levine B et al. Psychol Aging 2002; 17 (4):677689) validated to Spanish language. Subjects are asked to recollect memories from five different time periods (early childhood, teenage years, early adulthood, middle adulthood and last year). The information given were segmented and scored to obtain quantitative data. The results were analyzed considering the described variables and compared vs. healthy subjects. All patients were evaluated with our neuropsychological assessment protocol. Results: Patients tend to produce fewer internal details and more external details and referred less emotional change than healthy subjects, although the difference was not significant. Patients with an onset age below 10 years, showed higher scores when asked how clear they visualize the event narrated. Conclusion: Our group of patients does not showed significant abnormalities inAMcompared with a control group. It appears to be no significant influence of the onset age, laterality, type of epilepsy and disease duration in their AM. In the future, the results showed will be compared with a postsurgical population.