Long-term forgetting in temporal lobe epilepsy: Is this phenomenon a norm?

This research investigated forgetting rates of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) at brief and longer intervals.

The sample is formed by 5 patients with TLE and 10 healthy individuals. One of the patients received the diagnosis of transient epileptic amnesia (TEA). All patients underwent a standardized clinical protocol for diagnosis including a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. In addition, two experimental tasks were used to assess the forgetting rates at 4 intervals (30s, 10min, 1day, and 1week): a story task to evaluate verbal cued recall and a route task to assess visuospatial cued recall.

There were no significant differences between groups in forgetting rates.

These findings suggest that forgetting patterns in patients with TLE may be heterogeneous, and the presence of accelerated long-term forgetting is not universal.