Abstracts

Although selective amygdalohippocampectomy was developed in epilepsy surgery to spare unaffected brain tissue minimizing the cognitive consequences of temporal lobe surgery, several previous studies have shown that it was equivocal whether selective amygdalohippocampectomy for intractable epilepsy could lead to a better memory outcome or not. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of selective surgery to short-term memory outcome in patients of intractable mesial temporal lobe epilepsy who underwent transsylvian selective amygdalohippocampampectomy (TSA)., The 51 patients received comprehensive neuropsychological testing of verbal and nonverbal memory, attension, and delayed recall before and 1 months after unilateral TSA., Significant improvements in verbal memory and delayed recall were found particularly for the right resected group. For right TSA, the outcome of verbal memory was not related to hippocampal pathology, however, the risk for a nonverbal memory decline was increased when patients had non hippocampal sclerosis. After left TSA, there were no significant decline and it indicated that all aspects of memory were preserved after surgery although the risk for a verbal memory decline was increased of patients without hippocampal sclerosis.[table1], The results indicate that left TSA can lead to preserve the memory function, particularly right TSA can lead to a significant improvements in memory functions.,