Anomia prehabilitation in temporal lobe epilepsy surgery: A pilot study.

Objective: An emerging approach in surgery is to propose prehabilitation programs to strengthen the patient's functional abilities before surgical interventions, thus helping them cope better with its consequences. In drug-resistant language-dominant temporal lobe epilepsy (LdTLE), surgical treatment carries a risk of increasing cognitive deficits, notably word-finding difficulties (anomia) and verbal memory difficulties that negatively impact personal, social, and occupational activities. In this study, we invited 15 LdTLE patients to enroll in a speech and language prehabilitation program adapted to the specifics of their difficulties, organized daily during the preoperative period.

Methods: Naming performance (for trained and untrained words) was studied twice before prehabilitation, during prehabilitation, and 1 week and 6 months after surgery. Results were analyzed using a generalized linear mixed effects model.

Results: We found a significant effect of prehabilitation on trained items before surgery. Postoperatively, trained items showed a slight and nonsignificant performance increase compared to baseline, whereas untrained items showed a significant decline in the same comparison.

Significance: We conclude that trained words were better protected from postsurgical decline than untrained words. Our research can contribute to patient support during surgical decision-making; ultimately, prehabilitation might be considered as part of individualized care. These encouraging results lay the groundwork for more detailed or powerful examinations of the protective effect of prehabilitation on language skills.