LANGUAGE DETERIORATION IN A CASE OF LONG-TERM EPILEPSY

Abstract

This research employed a case study approach to examine the linguistic features of a 51-year-old woman with lifelong chronic unspecified epilepsy who had been treated with phenobarbital. The patient was also diagnosed with major neurocognitive disorders secondary to epilepsy, mixed anxiety disorder, and moderate depression. This study utilized a linguistic task evaluation protocol for patients with epilepsy, as proposed by Alarcón et al. This protocol guided the selection and implementation of various assessment tools, including the adult neurorehabilitation clinical history format, WAIS-IV listening comprehension tasks, Neuropsi battery language tests, Neurobel adaptation phoneme discrimination subtask, and complementary tests of the Boston test praxias subtest. The findings revealed impairments in oral language, reading, writing, and mathematical ability. These deficits were characterized by difficulties in expressive-comprehensive aspects, conversational and discursive skills, and challenges in automatic reading, reading comprehension, dysgraphia, dysorthography, and arithmetic calculations. Given these results, this study recommends a multidisciplinary neurorehabilitation intervention to enhance the quality of life of patients and their families.