Pre- and postoperative general neurocognitive status and memory in 70 epilepsy surgery patients

Purpose - To describe cognitive function preoperatively and cognitive chang e 2 years postoperatively in 70 consecutive adults in the Goteborg epilepsy surgery series. Methods - Analysis of general neurocognitive status and me mory for the total group and for three subgroups: 26 patients with seizure onset in dominant temporal lobe, 28 patients with onset in non-dominant tem poral lobe and 12 with frontal lobe onset. Preoperative performance was com pared with a control group (n = 30). Results - Preoperatively, patients wer e more impaired in general neurocognitive status than controls. Patients in the temporal lobe subgroups performed worse than controls in two memory va riables. No postoperative negative change was found at group level. There w as a small increase in Full Scale IQ and Performance IQ for the total patie nt group, and in Performance IQ for the frontal lobe subgroup. At individua l level, many patients suffered losses or obtained gains in a number of mem ory variables without any consistent intra-pattern. Conclusions - Cognitive stability was the main postoperative result. The importance of considering inter- and intra-individual variability of negative as well as positive ch ange is emphasized.