Evaluation of duration of epilepsy prior to temporal lobe epilepsy surgery during the past two decades.

We examined whether duration of epilepsy prior to temporal lobe resection has decreased over the years as a result of increasing body of evidence in the literature showing the benefits of anterior temporal resection. We stratified the 213 patients, who had their first temporal lobe resection at our center between 1996 and 2007 into three groups in order to detect any trends in duration of epilepsy: group A (surgery between 1996 and 1999); group B (surgery between 2000 and 2003); group C (surgery between 2004 and 2007). No difference in mean duration of epilepsy was detected between the three groups (p=0.54). The mean duration in epilepsy prior to temporal lobe resection has persisted at greater than 20 years during the past two decades.