Corpus callosotomy for epilepsy. II. Neurologic and neuropsychological outcome.

Eighteen uncontrolled epileptic patients had neuropsychological evaluation before and after partial or total corpus callosotomy. In patients with early-onset seizures and signs of severe unilateral CNS dysfunction, callosotomy produced no deficits and several improvements. All patients whose language-dominant hemisphere did not control their dominant hand had impairments in some aspect of speech and language function after callosotomy. In some patients, unilateral deterioration of motor function was observed, and was associated with mild to moderate dysfunction in the contralateral hemisphere (ie, memory impairment or preexisting hemiparesis). Postoperative deficits occurred with partial, as well as total, section.