Pre-surgical evaluation for epilepsy surgery

Neuropsychological testing may reflect subtle structural changes that may not be readily apparent with neuroimaging studies, and physiologic disruption of normal neural function secondary to epileptic activity. Neuropsychological testing is used during the pre-operative evaluation for epilepsy surgery to assess functional brain status, which, in turn, provides important information on the risks for post-operative neruopsychological deficits and also provides confirmatory evidence of seizure onset laterality in patients whose seizures originate in temporal lobes. This review will focus primarily on the pre-operative neuropsychological of candidates for temporal lobectomy surgery since they represent the majority of individuals undergoing ablative epilepsy surgery, and also because the literature and knowledge for the neuropsychology of temporal lobectomy far exceeds that of any other epilepsy surgical group.