Long-term forgetting in temporal lobe epilepsy: Is this phenomenon a norm?

Objectives: This research investigated forgetting rates of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) at brief and longer intervals. Methods: The sample is formed by 5 patients with TLE and 10 healthy individuals. One of the patients received the diagnosis of transient epileptic amnesia (TEA). All patients underwent a standardized clinical protocol for diagnosis including a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment. In addition, two experimental tasks were used to assess the forgetting rates at 4 intervals (30 s, 10 min, 1 day, and 1 week): a story task to evaluate verbal cued recall and a route task to assess visuospatial cued recall. Results: There were no significant differences between groups in forgetting rates. Conclusions: These findings suggest that forgetting patterns in patients with TLE may be heterogeneous, and the presence of accelerated long-term forgetting is not universal. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.