ABSTRACT

Depression and anxiety are the most common psychiatric disorders in patients with drug resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. This study evaluated depression, anxiety and quality of life in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy before and after ATL.

This prospective study was performed in 23 patient with resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. Clinical seizure characteristics, temporal lobe localization, seizure frequency, educational and socioeconomic status, antiepileptic medication, cranial MRI and pathology of cases were evaluated. BDE, BAI and SF-36 scales administered before and after ATL with standard interval.

We found a rate of 43.5% for depression and anxiety before surgical treatment. Depression and anxiety were found to be related only seziure frequency in terms of clinical and demographic features. The rate of depression and anxiety increased with increased frequency of seizures (p<0.001 and p=0.012 respectively). Depression and anxiety improved markedly following ATL in our cases. This improvement is directly associated with attaining a seizure-free state following surgical treatment (p<0.001). We found a marked improvement in all subscales of SF 36.

We found in this series that ATL can benefit carefully-chosen drug resistant TLE cases both with an improvement in epileptic seizures and also in the psychopathology. A seizure-free state following surgical treatment is the most powerful predictor of improvement findings of depression, anxiety and quality of life.

Keywords: Anterior temporal lobectomy, temporal lobe epilepsy, quality of life