CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Title: Autobiographical Memory in Temporal Lobe epilepsy: comparison between pre- and post-surgical assessment.Purpose: To compare the performance of patients with unilateral surgical excision of an epileptic focus in an autobiographical memory task.Method: We assessed 18 patients who had undergone an unilateral temporal lobectomy (11 left TLE and 7 right TLE) and 5 patients with extratemporal lobe resection (ETLE). All subjects were assessed preoperatively and one month after surgery with the Autobiographical Interview (AI) (Levine et al, 2002) adapted to spanish language. Subjects were 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 (internal/episodic and external/semantic details). Lateralization of epileptogenic zone, age of onset and duration of epilepsy were considered, as well as cognitive and psychiatric status. Results: TLE and ETLE patients´ performance on pre and postsurgical AI was not statistically significant. Not significant changes were observed after temporal lobectomy in left- and right-TL. Nevertheless, all subjects showed a tendency to recall fewer episodic details after surgery, particularly those with left TLE, and an increased number of semantic and external information. Conclusion: Our findings showed that surgery does not appeared to have a significant effect on episodic and semantic autobiographical memory regardless lateralization and localization. However, the results could be explained taking into account that the postsurgical AI was performed only a month after the surgery. It is possible that a later assessment (e.g. 1 or 2 years postsurgery) show a different outcome.