Psychological complications of temporal lobe epilepsy.

A series of young adults with temporal lobe epilepsy included 36% with psychological complications. The incidence of overt psychosis was 11%. Psychopathology was more common in subjects with left temporal lobe spike foci (43%) and in males (42%), but these trends did not attain statistical significance. Psychological complications became manifest in adolescence in 85% of the affected cases, and were more likely (p less than 0.01) to occur when seizures began in the second 5 years of life. Although seizures nearly always antedated psychological problems, the onsets of epilepsy and psychological complications did not directly correlated (p = 0.43).