Original Research Article
Year: 2019 | Month: May | Volume: 9 | Issue: 5 | Pages: 288-296
Utility of Western Aphasia Battery for Lateralizing Language Deficits in Persons with Medically Intractable Temporal and Extratemporal Epilepsy
Manju Mohan P1, Dr. S P Goswami2, Dr. Ramshekhar Menon3
1MSc. Speech Language Pathology, Speech Therapist, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Medical College Campus, Trivandrum – 695011, Kerala, India
2Professor, Department of Speech Language Pathology, All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore – 570006, Karnataka, India
3Additional Professor, Department of Neurology, Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology, Trivandrum-695011, Kerala, India
Corresponding Author: Manju Mohan P
ABSTRACT
Persons with epilepsy (PWE) are prone to cognitive linguistic deficits. Presurgical evaluations in these patients include language assessments along with other cognitive domain assessments for lateralizing epileptogenesis. Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) has been documented as a test for assessment of language functions in PWE. However, it is uncertain whether this test can be used as a presurgical tool for cognitive assessment for lateralizing epileptogenesis. Hence the current study was undertaken towards identifying the utility of WAB as a language tool during presurgical evaluation of PWE. A total of 64 Malayalam speaking right handed persons with clinically diagnosed refractory right and left hemispheric temporal and extratemporal epilepsy were included along with 64 healthy controls. All subjects underwent language evaluations using the Malayalam version of WAB and aphasic quotients were used as outcome measure. It was noted that the participants only differed in the verbal fluency subsection of WAB. The mean aphasia quotients were not statistically significant across patients and controls or across patient groups. It was noted that WAB was not a useful tool to study linguistic disturbances that could cue towards hemispheric lateralization of epilepsy when used as part of cognitive assessment in presurgical evaluations. The study put forth the need to develop specific cognitive linguistic test batteries for PWE that can potentially pick up the depressed linguistic functions affected by epilepsy and then could favorably cue towards possible lateralization of epilepsy.
Key words: Epilepsy, Western aphasia battery, language lateralization