Biomedical subjects

A Galdón-Castillo

Publications and source records attributed to A Galdón-Castillo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMedDate not supplied

[Protocol of pre-surgical neurophysiological evaluation in epilepsy resistant to treatment].

INTRODUCTION: Nowadays approximately twenty per cent of epileptic patients who are on a pharmacological treatment carry on their fits. Their instability can be eliminated with an operation in any center that is specialized in epileptic surgery. The center must have a cross disciplinary team. DEVELOPMENT: The ideal operation is one that only eliminates the tissue needed to end up with the fits The main goal of the neurophysiological evaluation is to delimit the cerebral area that generates an epileptogenic activity so as to be able to eliminate it without causing further damage. We present a medical record of pre-surgical neurophysiological evaluation that we would like to put into practice in our department in coordination with the services of neurology, radiodiagnosis, and neurosurgery. This medical record contains the following sections: 1. Selection of patients. 2. Non invasive pre-surgical evaluation. 3. Invasive pre-surgical evaluation. 4. Postsurgical evaluation. The invasive pre-surgical evaluation constitutes the most interesting part of the whole process, it allows thanks to intracranial registers to locate accurately epileptogenic focuses; what is more, it allows to carry out a functional mapping of areas that cannot be explored with surface techniques; and finally this evaluation allows to open new fields of investigation about the way in which the encephalon works. CONCLUSION: Epilepsy surgery is a subject to develop in Spain in which the neurophysiologic exploration is something essential.

Brain↗

PubMedDate not supplied

[Changes in episodic and semantic memory associated with temporal lobectomy].

INTRODUCTION: Temporal lobectomy (TL) is an effective treatment for drug refractory temporal lobe epilepsy. The main neuropsychological consequences of the intervention are changes in episodic and semantic memory. Aim. To study the consequences of right temporal lobectomy (RTL) and left temporal lobectomy (LTL) on episodic and semantic mnemonic functioning. PATIENTS AND METHOD: 27 patients who had undergone TL in the Hospital Universitario Virgen de las Nieves in Granada were submitted to pre and post surgical evaluation by means of a battery of neuropsychological tests that included episodic and semantic memory tests for both verbal and visual material. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: ANOVA analysis was employed to analyse the pre and post surgical changes for the whole group of patients, and Student s t and Wilcoxon s non parametric test were used for each group of RTL and LTL. No deterioration was found in ipsilateral memory after the intervention, that is to say, in the verbal memory of the patients submitted to LTL and in the visual memory of RTL patients. With regard to contralateral memory, that is, the visual memory of patients submitted to LTL and the verbal memory of RTL patients, the ANOVA analyses of the whole group revealed a statistically significant improvement. The analyses performed for the whole group (LTL and RTL), however, did not reveal any statistically significant changes.

Adult↗