Study of Cognitive Function Features in Epilepsy Patients

Aim: To investigate the features of cognitive function in epilepsy patients. Methods: 166 epilepsy patients with neuropsychologic tests were evaluated, 65 of whom were newly diagnosed. A battery of neuropsychologic tests comprises Auditory Verbal Learning test, Logical Memory test, Digital Symbol test, Stroop Color Word test, Trail Making test, Verbal Fluency test, Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure test and Boston Naming test. Results: Newly diagnosed patients did worse than the normal group in the immediately and delayed recall, cued recall, recognition task and semantic clustering of the Auditory Verbal Learning test, immediately and delayed recall of Logical Memory test, Digital Symbol test, Stroop Color Word test, Trail Making test, Verbal Fluency test and Boston Naming test. The 101 follow-up patients of relatively long epilepsy duration performed significantly worse in almost all the tests than the normal group,especially in Digital Symbol test and delayed recall of Auditory Verbal Learning test. When compared with the newly diagnosed patients, the out-patients of long epilepsy history and medication showed lower score in the immediately and delayed recall of Auditory Verbal Learning test, Logical Memory test, Digital Symbol test, Stroop Color Word test, Trail Making test and Verbal Fluency test, especially in Digital Symbol test. Conclusion: The epilepsy patients have general cognitive deficits, such as verbal memory, episodic memory, verbal learning capacity, visual spatial memory, attention, naming ability and psychomotor function. The pre-medication patients also show the above deficits except attention and visual special memory. When compared with the newly diagnosed epilepsy patients, the follow-up patients impaired more in the neuropsychological aspect of attention and psychomotor speed.