Interictal Behavioral Features of Patients With Epilepsy

Summary: Three questions are dealt with in this paper. (1) Do patients with epilepsy differ behaviorally from normal control groups and from persons with other medical and neurological conditions with respect to emotional adjustment, and if so, in what ways? (2) Are patients with temporal lobe epilepsy different emotionally or behaviorally from patients with other types of epilepsy? (3) To what degree does underlying brain dysfunction create a substrate for abnormal and maladaptive behavior? A review of the literature reveals the following. (1) Persons with epilepsy demonstrate more emotional and psychiatric problems than normal individuals and more difficulties than other patient groups having nonneurological disorders, but have about the same incidence of these problems as persons with other neurological disorders. (2) Increased emotional and psychiatric problems are not found among patients with temporal lobe epilepsy in comparison to patients with other types of epilepsy, although there are some behavioral peculiarities which appear in a small proportion of these patients. (3) There is a mild tendency for impairment on neuropsychological tests to be associated with emotional and psychiatric problems in epilepsy.