COMPARISON OF COGNITIVE PROFILE AND EMOTIONAL DISTRESS IN PATIENTS WITH GENERAL AND FOCAL EPILEPSY

Emotional and cognitive problems are common and annoying problems among patients with epilepsy. This study was carried out with the purpose of examining the cognitive profile and emotional distress of two groups of patients, one with the general and the other with the focal epilepsy.
The method used in this study is descriptive, the causal-comparative kind. The statistical population included all the patients, with epilepsy, who referred to neurology specialist's offices in Ardabil city from April to September, 2015. The sample group consisted of 60 patients (30 focal epilepsy cases and 30 general epilepsy cases) across the age range of 13 to 20 years, which was selected as the sample in access. To study the cognitive profile, subjects under study were asked to answer Andre Ray’s test for visual memory assessment, and to examine immediate and delayed auditory memory subscales, they were asked to answer the Wechsler Memory Scale. Also, in order to examine the patients’ emotional distress, they were asked to answer Lewinda’s depression, anxiety and stress scale. Research data were analyzed by the use of descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis (MANOVA).
The results showed that patients with focal epilepsy, compared with the general epilepsy patients, show poorer performance in cognitive abilities related to auditory and visual memory. Also, patients with focal epilepsy display higher emotional distress than patients with general epilepsy.
The results of this study prove that cognitive profile and emotional distress vary among the two groups of patients one with general and the other with focal epilepsy.