Staggered spondaic word test in epileptic patients

Abstract

CONTEXT: Auditory processing during childhood may be altered if there is any predisposing factor during the course of development. Neurological disorders are among the risk factors for auditory processing impairment. From this perspective, epileptic children present such a risk factor and could present auditory processing dysfunction. OBJECTIVE: To evaluate central auditory processing in epileptic patients using the Staggered Spondaic Word Test (SSW) in order to verify whether these patients presented auditory disorders and whether the type of crisis partial or generalized played a role in the occurrence and type of disorder. SETTING: Tertiary care hospital. SAMPLE: Thirty-eight children and adolescents, ranging from 7 to 16 years old, with a diagnosis of epilepsy divided into two groups: 23 patients with partial crisis and 15 patients with generalized crisis. MAIN MEASUREMENTS: Performance in the Staggered Spondaic Word Test versus epileptic crisis type (partial or generalized). RESULTS: The majority of epileptic patients showed central auditory processing disorders. There were no differences in relation to crisis type. Both groups showed similar performance, although the results observed for these patients differ from what is obtained with normal populations. With regard to response bias, there were also no differences in performance between subjects with partial or generalized seizures. All possible disorders were found in both groups, without the prevalence of one specific disorder over the other. CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed a high prevalence of disorders among epileptic patients in relation to processing partially overlapped verbal sounds in a dichotic paradigm.

Processamento auditivo em indivíduos com epilepsia de lobo temporal

“…However, these findings disagree from the specialized literature since we did not observe clear right ear advantage in the processing of verbal stimuli -dissyllabic digits -in a dichotic task 7,10,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . This may have probably occurred due to a greater ease of the stimuli used in the Portuguese version for this research.…”

“…The results attained in the present research agree with those from Dibi (1996) and Ortiz, Pereira, Vilanova (2002) when they observed worse results in the group of individuals with epilepsy when compared to normal subjects in the verbal dichotic task test 29,32 . However, these findings disagree from the specialized literature since we did not observe clear right ear advantage in the processing of verbal stimuli -dissyllabic digits -in a dichotic task 7,10,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] .…”

“…The results attained in this paper corroborate those from Ortiz, Pereira, Vilanova (2003) when they analyzed the Free Attention Stage of Group II individuals, since the author also observed response symmetry in normal individuals in this Test stage 8 , and those from Ortiz, Pereira, Vilanova (2002) who noticed a worse performance in epileptic individuals in the Non-Verbal Dichotic Test when compared to normal individuals and lack of ear advantage in the processing of non-verbal processing 29 . However, they disagree when the author mentioned a difficulty the epileptic individuals have in lateralizing their attention to one of the ears, since of those group I individuals, only one of them presented a high number of errors in the Guided Hearing Test.…”

“…Herrero, Hillix (1990) used phrases as stimuli in their study, however considered their prosodic content variable 31 . Studies using similar stimuli to the ones used here assessed normal and epileptic individuals with the non-verbal test 8,29 .…”

Language brain dominance in patients with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy: a comparative study between functional magnetic resonance imaging and dichotic listening test

“…The first case suggests the occurrence of brain reorganization due to neuronal plasticity, but modification exclusively of pathways involved in the central hearing processing can also be suggested since the patient showed left hemisphere language dominance in the fMRI test. According to Ortiz et al 32 , the processing of hearing information during childhood may be modified if any predisposition factor is present during development, and neurological alterations represent one of the risk factors for dysfunctions of the hearing processing.…”