Preoperative standardised neuropsychological testing plus MRI is superior to WADA testing in predicting verbal memory outcome in left TLE patients after removal of the hippocampus

Purpose: To identify the best predictors of postoperative verbal memory decline in patients undergoing left temporal lobe excisions for epilepsy. Methods: A retrospective analysis was carried out on data from 59 patients with left mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) who underwent en-bloc resection. Memory was assessed by a standard word list-learning task (z-score for total number of words over 5 trials) administered before and after surgery. For the MR images, a new rating was devised to characterize the extent of hippocampal damage. Atrophy and signal change of the hippocampus were examined separately. Both ch…