Presurgery neuropsychological evaluation in pediatric focal epilepsies

INTRODUCTION: Neuropsychological assessment is included in the protocols for evaluation of epilepsy surgery candidates, providing information about the patient's cognitive dysfunctions, allowing for prediction of possible cognitive deficits derived from surgery and yielding objective measures of any post-surgical changes. Neuropsychological disturbances constitute an important co-morbidity of medically intractable epilepsy. An early epilepsy onset in infancy may lead to cognitive dysfunctions that are atypical in terms of brain localization, due to the inherent plasticity and reorganization processes of the immature brain. The analysis of the neuropsychological profiles of paediatric focal epilepsies is much more complex than in the adult population. DEVELOPMENT AND CONCLUSIONS: In this paper, we review the neuropsychological disturbances associated to focal epilepsies (posterior cortex, temporal and frontal epilepsies), stressing the point that there is a considerable lack of rigorous studies on the topic in the literature, in spite of this being an essential part of the presurgical work-up in epilepsy patients.