Abstracts

Rationale: Complaints about everyday memory are common in children with epilepsy but the basis for those complaints is unclear. Impaired everyday memory may be directly tied to the epilepsy itself, particularly temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), or may be secondary to common co-morbid conditions such as ADHD or mood disturbance. To assess the specific vulnerability of children with focal epilepsy, and those with TLE in particular, parent and child reports of everyday memory were assessed for patients with different seizure foci and in children with ADHD and mood disturbances without seizures. The contribution of inattention to everyday memory complaints across diagnostic categories was also examined. Methods: Participants with epilepsy either had TLE (n=43), frontal lobe epilepsy (n=23), or parietal/occipital epilepsy (n=21). A second group of participants did not have epilepsy but had either ADHD (n=60) or a mood disturbance (n=27). All were at least 8 years old with Verbal IQ scores > 80. Groups did not differ on IQ, age, or parental education. Parents and children completed the Everyday Verbal Memory Questionnaire, a parent and self-report measure of everyday memory complaints comprised of 2 scales: Prospective Memory and Learning/Retrieval. Clinical verbal memory (WRAML-2) and attention (Conners' Continuous Performance Test-II) tests were administered. Parent and teacher reports of inattention included the Achenbach CBCL Attention Problems scale and the Student Behavior Survey ADHD scale. Results: Analyses of variance revealed that neither children with TLE nor their parents reported more learning/retrieval or prospective memory problems than other seizures types. There were no between seizure group differences on clinical memory and attention tests. Epilepsy, ADHD, and mood disturbance groups differed only on parent prospective memory complaints (p < .0001). Post-hoc analyses revealed parents of ADHD children reported more prospective memory problems than parents of children with TLE (p < .0001) but not mood disturbance. Stepwise regression analyses revealed parent report of inattention was a significant predictor, accounting for 41% of the variance (p < .0001) in their complaints about children's prospective memory problems and 18% of the variance in their complaints about learning/retrieval problems (p < .0001). Teacher report of inattention was a significant predictor of parent prospective memory complaints (6% of the variance, p < .01) but not parent report of learning/retrieval problems. Stepwise regression analyses also indicated parent report of inattention accounted for 9% of the variance in children s prospective memory complaints (p < .001) and 3% of the variance in children s complaints of learning/retrieval problems (p < .05). Teachers report of inattention predicted children s prospective memory complaints (10% of variance, p <.001) but not children's reports of learning/retrieval problems. Conclusions: Findings suggest that the complaints of everyday memory problems in pediatric epilepsy reflect problems with sustained attention rather than frank memory deficits.