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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Neurol.
Sec. Epilepsy
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fneur.2024.1416713
This article is part of the Research Topic Neural correlates of connected speech indices in acquired neurological disorders. View all 5 articles

Associations between neurolinguistic deficits and personality traits in people with epilepsy

Provisionally accepted
Nikitas Floros Nikitas Floros 1,2*Nikolaos Papagiannakis Nikolaos Papagiannakis 3Andreas Kyrozis Andreas Kyrozis 3Elisabeth Chroni Elisabeth Chroni 2Panagiotis Polychronopoulos Panagiotis Polychronopoulos 2
  • 1 First Department of Psychiatry, Aeginition Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
  • 2 School of Health Sciences, University of Patras, Patras, Western Greece, Greece
  • 3 First Department of Neurology, Aeginition Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Intro: People with epilepsy (PWE) have been hypothesized to have higher prevalence of personality disorders and cognitive disorders. The objective of this study was to investigate the controversial notion of "epileptic personality", a series of supposedly specific personality traits of people with epilepsy (PWE). Methods: For this purpose, 29 individuals with Mesial Temporal lobe Epilepsy (MTLE) and 23 with Juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) as confirmed by electroencephalography (EEG), MRI scans and clinical examination, underwent a thorough neuropsychological and personality assessment. The resulting neuropsychological profiles were statistically analyzed considering possible personality disorders, character traits, cognitive and linguistic deviations from 20 healthy controls (HC). Results: Our findings suggest accumulative cognitive and linguistic deficits in individuals with epilepsy compared to controls. It is possible that these might be misinterpreted as personality disorders. Specifically, personality traits (p=0.049) and verbal fluency (p=0.013), were significantly different between PWEs and controls. Also, the type of epilepsy and lateralization seem to affect executive function (p=0.049) and pragmatology scores (p<0.001), exhibiting differences in subgroup analysis. Discussion: Different theories are considered as plausible pathophysiological explanations for the aforementioned differences. This research might serve as a basis to further investigate the cognitive aspects of epilepsy and possible pharmacological interventions, which are currently lacking.

    Keywords: epileptic personality1, Epilepsy2, neuropsychiatry3, neuropsychology4, neurolinguistics5, pragmatology6

    Received: 12 Apr 2024; Accepted: 10 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Floros, Papagiannakis, Kyrozis, Chroni and Polychronopoulos. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Nikitas Floros, First Department of Psychiatry, Aeginition Hospital, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece

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