A neuropsychological battery for epilepsy.

The development of the Neuropsychological Battery for Epilepsy is presented. The tests are designed to be helpful in the evaluation of adult epileptics. The battery consists of General Measures which include tests in the areas of intellectual functioning, emotional status, and lateral dominance. The development of a series of 16 Discriminative Measures is presented in detail through the discussion of a pilot study, the principal investigation, and a cross-validational effort. In the principal study, 50 epileptics were individually paired with individuals having no history of neurological disease, and their performances on a wide range of ability measures were compared. Tests were eliminated if they did not appear sensitive to the brain-related problems of epileptics, if they demonstrated excessive duplication with other measures, or if they did not cross-validate with a new sample of 25 epileptic--normal pairs. The advantages of the battery were discussed, including coverage of areas previously not adequately assessed, elimination of tests with limited utility, greater uniformity and accuracy in the classification of individual subjects, and standardization of the tests with epileptics.