Preoperative Speech Rehabilitation in Drug-Resistant Temporal Epilepsy: A Case Study

Out of 30,000 new cases per year in France, 30% of epileptic patients are drug-resistant. Neurosurgery, which consists in resecting the epileptogenic zone, is the only chance of cure. In the case of temporal epilepsy of the language-dominant hemisphere (TLE), this procedure presents a high risk of increasing cognitive difficulties and may even be contraindicated for this reason alone. The difficulties found are impairments in lexical access (anomia) and verbal memory and affect more than 60% of patients. Preoperative cognitive rehabilitation could influence brain plasticity mechanisms but there are currently no recommendations on this topic. In this context, a speech rehabilitation procedure specific to the needs of ELTPR patients was developed. Investigators rely on cognitive hypotheses explaining the disorders but also on models of rehabilitation-induced neural plasticity likely to improve cognitive reserve before surgery. Investigators hypothesize that preoperative cognitive language rehabilitation in ELTPR patients may decrease surgical risk and improve postoperative language prognosis. The main objective is to demonstrate the efficacy of preoperative speech therapy on language performance and to evaluate possible protective effects on postoperative language prognosis. Single case study following the Single Case Experimental Design (SCED) methodology involving the prior definition of the following elements: a repeated measure of the target behavior (naming abilities), the sequential introduction of an intervention (speech therapy), whose effect will be evaluated according to SCED specific analysis and statistics (visual analysis, Tau -U, randomized tests). Investigators expect patients' naming performance to be stable before the introduction of speech therapy. It is expected that patients will progress in the trained words from the beginning of speech therapy. Finally, in the postoperative period, investigators predict that for the trained words, patients wil