Abstracts

Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) show impairment in confrontation naming tasks. Furthermore naming difficulties have been related to left temporal dysfunction.
The objective of this study is to characterize naming difficulties in a group of temporal epileptic patients and further compare naming abilities between patients with right and left temporal lobe epilepsy. Thirty three epileptic patients were matched for age and education with 31 healthy volunteers. Fourteen patients had left TLE epilepsy and nineteen right TLE. All patients were right handed with IQs within the normal range.
All subjects were administered an extensive neuropsychological battery. Confrontation naming was explored using the Boston Naming Test adapted version for Argentina. Total number of correct responses and type of errors committed were analyzed. Errors were classified into 5 categories: semantic errors, phonemic errors, visual errors, circumlocutory errors or nonresponse. For analysis purposes only the first 40 naming errors were considered as previous local studies showed that naming deficits in the last 20 pictures is strongly influenced by education and cultural background. The epilepsy group performed significantly worse than controls on a naming test (TLE=46 [plusmn]6 vs controls=53[plusmn]2 , p[lt]0.001). Type of errors were: 42% semantic, 32% nonresponses, 13% circumlocutory , 9 % visual and only 1% phonemic errors.
No naming differences were found between right and left TLE patients ( p= 0.7). Temporal lobe epilepsy patients showed poor performance on a naming task compared to control subjects further supporting the language deficit observed in this population. The most common type of errors (anomia and semantic) reflect dysfunction of the semantic system. Surprisingly, no differences were found when right and left temporal epilepsy patients were compared. This finding might reflect functional reorganization of language-related neuronal networks in temporal lobe epilepsy.