Introduction: Recently, we have published the results of a first surgical series of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). We describe a posterior series of patients intervened of TLE, we compare the functional results with the previous series and we finally analyze the causes of changes.
Patients and methods: We studied the first 22 consecutive patients surgically intervened of TLE with a minimum post-surgery follow-up of 2 years. Patients showing I and II Engel's grade were used as gold standard for evaluation of pre-surgical complementary studies.
Results: We have obtained better functional results: 91% patients showing Engel's grade I, 9% showing grade II and neither III nor IV grades were obtained. Pre-surgical studies changed in comparison with the previous report. The most improving change was observed in video-EEG with foramen-ovale electrodes (FOE) (37%), scalp EEG (26.6%), interictal SPECT (11.7%) and MRI (11.7%). Video-EEG with FOE was the study than showed greater concordance with epileptic focus (95.5%), followed by EEG (86.4%). In 35% of cases, MRI was normal or without valid data for correct localization of focus.
Conclusions: Video-EEG with FOE and TLE surgery are safety methods, which results improve with the experience. Normal or not informative MRI do not should a priori reject those patients with drug-resistant TLE from surgery.