COGNITIVE CORRELATES OF INTERICTAL AFFECTIVE AND BEHAVIORAL DISTURBANCES IN PEOPLE WITH EPILEPSY

We investigated specific cognitive correlates of three affective/behav ioral disturbances; namely, depression, obsessive-compulsiveness and p aranoia, in 32 people with medically refractory seizures. Cognitive va riables were attention/concentration, verbal and nonverbal memory, ver bal comprehension, and perseverative responding, as measured with stan dard neuropsychological tests. The Brief Symptom Inventory was used to measure affective/behavioral disturbances. The overall relation betwe en the cognitive and affective/behavioral variables was significant (m ultivariate R2 = 0.613; p < 0.05). As hypothesized, hierarchical regre ssions showed that the set of variables comprised of attention/concent ration and verbal and nonverbal memory was significantly related to de pression (R2 = 0.342; p < 0.008), even when the remaining cognitive va riables were taken into account (sr2 = 0.193; p < 0.051). As hypothesi zed, perseverative responding was significantly related to obsessive-c ompulsiveness (R2 = 0.336; p < 0.006), even when the remaining cogniti ve variables were taken into account (sr2 = 0.20; p < 0.01). As predic ted, verbal and nonverbal memory, perseverative responding, and verbal comprehension were significantly related to paranoia (R2 = 0.312; p < 0.04) and approached acceptable levels of statistical significance wh en the remaining cognitive variable was taken into account (sr2 = 0.16 3; p < 0.06). In no case did cognitive variables hypothesized to be un related to the dependent variable reach statistical significance when the other variables were taken into account. The results raise the pos sibility that specific cognitive disturbances may be risk factors for specific affective/behavioral disturbances in epilepsy.