Cognitive retraining in epilepsy

Chapter 16 of our textbook talks about disorders of the brain, their symptoms, and how to treat them. One of the disorders I chose was Epilepsy because my one year old nephew has this disorder. The doctors are saying he will grow out of it, his medicine has helped a lot with the seizures and we are hoping for the best. Epilepsy is where a person suffers from recurrent seizures, either idiopathic(spontaneous) or symptomatic(has a specific cause). The current research study wishes to study the effects of cognitive retraining on targeted skills areas. The measures of neuropsychological functioning were a group of tests/tasks, showing emphasis on memory, attention, and emotional state. The subject was 32 years old, male, and a graduate working in a factory. He has had epilepsy for 8 years. After the patient has seizures he often feels mentally slow and has aches and pains in the limbs that had convulsive movements. His seizures lasted 3-5 minutes and would occur 5-7 times before treatment was started.  Regular intake of anti-seizure drugs decreased his seizures but he was still having about 3 a year. He developed a fear of seizures and experienced a slow decline in his concentration and memory power which became a setback at work. A neuropsychological evaluation was performed to identify areas for needed rehab. The researchers gave him treatment in attention/concentration and memory. The treatment was comprised of cognitive and supportive therapy. The cognitive retraining included both paper and pencil tasks and real life activities aimed at improving his ability to focus and sustain attention. The training program lasted 6 weeks. Results showed an overall increase in performance across the 6 week training period. The researcher believes that their findings show that by identifying cognitive deficits in patients, effective training programs can be implemented to help regain some performance and be beneficial to epilepsy sufferers.

Gupta, A., & Naorem, T. (2003). Cognitive retraining in epilepsy. Brain Injury, 17(2), 161-174.

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