Abstracts

Rationale: Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy (JME), genetically determined epilepsy, has a well-established clinical phenotype considering electroclinical features, cognitive deficits and psychiatric disorders. Executive and attentional impairments are extensively reported in this syndrome, but memory deficits are less often described (Lin et al. 2013; Moschetta et al. 2012; Pascalicchio et al. 2007). Ecological measures were developed to investigate everyday and prospective memory that is associated with memory complaints such as they are presented in patients' day-to-day life and environment. To the best of our knowledge, this type of memory has not been evaluated in JME. We aimed to assess everyday and prospective memory in patients with JME. Methods: We evaluated 22 patients with JME (16 [73%] female; mean age 27.48 [SD 9.2]; 102.7 [SD 14.8) and their performance was compared to 22 matched healthy controls (14 [64%] female; mean age 28.90 [SD 7.3]; mean IQ108.9 [SD 11.6]) without epilepsy or psychiatric disorders. We used Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test (RBMT) to evaluate prospective and everyday memory. The RBMT is designed to determine patients' ability to remember an appointment, a short route (immediate and delayed), name of an unknown person (first and last name), a place where a personal belonging is stored, to give a message, to remember a short story, object and face recognition and, temporal and spatial orientation. Epilepsy-related factors evaluated were age of onset, duration of epilepsy, seizure control (TCG, myoclonic and typical absence), AEDs (mono versus polytherapy) and refractoriness. Group differences were analyzed with statistical tests for nonparametric data. Data were analyzed using SPSS Statistics Version 17.0 (SPSS Inc., Chicago, IL, U.S.A.). Chi-square tests were applied to categorical data. Results: Patients showed similar performance compared to controls on the overall score of RBMT (p 0,215). Patients had more difficult to recall the place where personal items were stored (p 0,043), but not with other domains. Epilepsy-related factors, including seizure control and use of AEDs in polytherapy and higher doses, were not associated with RBMT scores. Conclusions: Patients with JME do not present a worse performance in everyday and prospective memory compared to controls, except to remember places where items where stored. The authors postulate that this mild dysfunction may be more related with the attention deficits, previously described in these patients (Moschetta et al., 2012). Therefore, patients with JME are not impaired considering every day and prospective memory. Funding: none