PREDICTORS OF NAMING DECLINE AFTER DOMINANT TEMPORAL LOBECTOMY: AGE AT ONSET OF EPILEPSY AND AGE OF WORD ACQUISITION
Abstract number :
2.356
Submission category :
Year :
2003
Submission ID :
1967
Source :
www.aesnet.org
Presentation date :
12/6/2003 12:00:00 AM
Published date :
Dec 1, 2003, 06:00 AM
Authors :
Ilana M. Ruff, Sara J. Swanson, Thomas A. Hammeke, Wade M. Mueller, George L. Morris, Santiago Arroyo, Marianna V. Spanaki Neuroscience, Brown University, Providence, RI; Department of Neurology, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI; Department of
To examine the factors that affect object naming decline in patients who undergo dominant anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) and the correlation between age of word acquisition (AoA) and loss of specific object names post-surgically.
Subjects for this study were 120 patients who underwent dominant (n-47) or non-dominant (n= 73) ATL. The dominant ATL group was further divided into 24 patients with an early onset of epilepsy and 23 patients with late onset of epilepsy. All subjects were administered the Boston Naming Test (BNT) prior to and following ATL. AoA norms derived by Bell and coauthors (2000) for the words on the BNT were used to examine the correlation between AoA and specific object names lost or gained after ATL for each group. The percent of each group that lost or gained each word on the BNT from before to after surgery was calculated.
Pre-surgical BNT scores did not differ between the dominant and nondominant ATL groups. The post-surgical BNT score declined significantly in the dominant ATL group (p[lt].01) and was significantly lower than the post-surgical score for the nondominant ATL group (p[lt].01). The nondominant ATL group mean improved by 2.03 points from pre to post-surgery, while the dominant ATL group mean declined by 6.72 points. Among dominant ATL patients, the patients with late age at onset of seizures declined significantly more (11.04 points) than the patients with early onset seizures (2.58 points) (p[lt].01). When individual object names were examined, age of acquisition of words was correlated with whether words were lost or gained after surgery in all four groups (dominant, nondominant, dominant early onset and dominant late onset). The correlation between AoA and percent of the group losing object names was -.354 (p[lt].01) for the early onset and -.522 (p[lt].01) for the late onset dominant ATL group. Both early and late onset dominant ATL groups were more likely to lose object names acquired later in life.
ATL in the language dominant hemisphere and late onset of seizures predict post-operative naming decline. In addition, words acquired later in life are most likely to be lost post-surgically for patients undergoing dominant ATL.
[Supported by: Epilepsy Foundation of America Behavioral Sciences Student Fellowship]