Abstracts

Rationale: The RBANS (Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status) is a widely used screening battery in patients with neurologic cerebral dysfunction. However, there is little published research in patients who have epilepsy. We present its utility in patients in an Arab cohort, who have intractable epilepsy and compared it to healthy controls. Methods: In this observational study, we selected patients with intractable epilepsy who were referred from an Epilepsy clinic for neuropsychological evaluation in a tertiary care hospital, in Al Ain, UAE. The RBANS was administered to patients and their standard scores were calculated for each of the five indexes of the battery (Immediate Memory, Visuospatial/Constructional, Language, Attention and Delayed Memory) and compared to matched healthy controls. We collected demographics and underlying lesional etiology for epilepsy. Results: Each group comprised of 6 females and 1 male, mean (+ SD) age 26.71(+4.6) years in the intractable epilepsy group (n=7) and mean (+ SD) age 28.29(+3.7) years in the healthy matched controls (n=7). Four patients had temporal lobe epilepsy and three, extra-temporal lobe epilepsy. The Chi-Square test was performed to examine the relation between group Index scores that indicated potential impairment (<75) versus no impairment (>75). The relation between these scores was significant, X² (2, N = 14) = 14 (P <0.01). Epilepsy patients showed significant impairments across all RBANS Indices with mean total scores (+ SD) 51.4(+9.3) compared to healthy controls (+SD) 90(+12.8). Conclusions: We conclude that RBANS is a quick and convenient tool for detecting cognitive impairment in our cohort of Arab patients with intractable epilepsy and can be used to identify impaired cognitive domains for further selective neuropsychological evaluation. The utility of the RBANS in a larger cohort of epilepsy patient's needs further study.