Characterizing Affective and Non-Affective Cognitive Performance and Psychological Symptoms in Adolescents with Epilepsy
Abstract number :
1.268
Submission category :
6. Cormorbidity (Somatic and Psychiatric)
Year :
2023
Submission ID :
234
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/2/2023 12:00:00 AM
Published date :
Authors :
Presenting Author: Crystal Cooper, PhD – Cook Children’s Health Care System
F. Kathryn King, MS – Graduate Research Assistant, Jane and John Justin Institute for Mind Health, Cook Children’s Health Care System; Kaitlin Killian, BS – Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington; Daniela Ventura, AS – Department of Psychology – University of Texas at Arlington; Brianna-marie McCullough, BS – Research Assistant, Jane and John Justin Institute for Mind Health, Cook Children’s Health Care System; Marsha Gabriel, PhD – Cook Children’s Health Care System – Jane and John Justin Institute for Mind Health; Tracy Greer, PhD – Department of Psychology – University of Texas at Arlington; M. Scott Perry, MD – Medical Director, Jane and John Justin Institute for Mind Health, Cook Children’s Health Care System; Christos Papadelis, PhD – Director of Research, Jane and John Justin Institute for Mind Health, Cook Children’s Health Care System
Rationale: Depression and anxiety are commonly observed psychiatric illnesses in epilepsy, and risk is higher with earlier onset epilepsy. A bidirectional relationship is posited to exist between epilepsy and psychiatric disorders that is compounded by a similar relationship between dysfunctions in cognitive processes that give rise to psychiatric symptoms, and vice versa. Despite key clinical characterization of neuropsychiatric function in people with epilepsy (PWE), there is a need for phenotyping of affective and non-affective cognitions thought to underlie cardinal psychiatric symptoms. Here, we characterized dysfunction in affective and non-affective processing and their associated depression and anxiety symptoms in adolescent PWE and typically developing controls (TD).
Methods: Both PWE (n=23) and TD (n=25) adolescents (aged 10-19; 25 female) underwent a battery of cognitive tasks and online assessments. Tasks included the Flanker Interference (FIT) to assess cognitive control, Emotional Conflict (ECT) to assess emotional conflict reactivity, and Probabilistic Reward (PRT) to assess reward learning (Figure 1). Clinical scales were the nine item Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ9) to assess depression severity, Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Scale (GAD7) to assess anxiety severity, and the Dimensional Anhedonia Rating Scale (DARS) to assess level of anhedonia. Differences in accuracy and reaction time (RT) on these measures were calculated between PWE and TD using independent samples t-tests. Relationship of cognitive performance to clinical scores was also characterized using Pearson correlations.
Results: For the FIT, PWE had lower accuracy and a greater interference effect as shown by slower RT to incongruent stimuli (ps = .05) as expected. Depression and anxiety levels were negatively related to RT in the task generally, but anhedonia was negatively related to interference RT for PWE (ps < .05). For the ECT, TD showed the typical response to emotion conflict, slower RTs for incongruent compared to congruent pairs (p < .05), but not PWE. Lower anhedonia was related to greater performance with positive stimuli for TD, while higher depression was related to greater performance with negative stimuli for PWE (ps < .05). For the PRT, reward learning was equivalent between the groups not as expected, but PWE had slower RT overall than TD (p < .05). Higher depression was related to greater accuracy in PWE (p < .05). See Figure 2 for results.
Cormorbidity (Somatic and Psychiatric)