Abstracts

Rationale: To investigate social cognition disorders in idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) patients and compare their performances with temporal lobe epilepsy ones (TLE).Methods: We recruited thirty-five patients (21 TLE, 18 IGE) and 22 healthy controls (HC) matched for age. General exclusion criteria were history of other neuropsychiatric disorders, learning and intelligence deficits, age<18 years. All patients and controls underwent standardized neuropsychological battery. Social cognition abilities were assessed with a single non-verbal cartoon test assessing emotion and intention attribution (story-based empathy task-SET) and emotion recognition with Ekman-60-Faces Test. Nonparametric tests (Mann-Whitney-U and Kruskall-Wallis test) were used to analyze group differences. Results: The three groups did not differ in age at testing, gender and education (p>0.05). Compared to HC, TLE patients were significantly impaired both on SET global score (27.7 5.5 vs 29.0 7.6;p<0.003) and single scores (emotion and intention attribution, causal inferences). Mean Ekman score was significant lower in both TLE (47.6 4.7) and IGE (47.4 5.4) compared with HC (50.5 5.2;p=0.08). Compared to HC, TLE showed significantly worse scores in fear and disgust recognition, while recognition of fear and anger were worse in IGE (p<0.05). Conclusions: We confirmed previous findings showing deficits in social cognition and global facial emotion recognition in TLE, with a prevalent impairment of negative emotions. We also demonstrated poor facial emotion recognition in IGE. Our data provide evidence of neurobehavioral impairment and difficulties in social functioning in chronic epileptic patients. Specific deficits are associated with TLE and IGE subtypes, related to disruption of a pathway involving frontal, temporal and limbic regions.