Improvement of quality-of-life following resective surgery for temporal lobe epilepsy: results of patient and family assessments.

In order to evaluate the quality-of-life (QOL) of epilepsy surgery patients, we surveyed patients' degree of life satisfaction and their families' degree of satisfaction with patient's status in a range of domains both pre- and post-operatively. Of 100 patient-family sets of surveys that were mailed out, 93 were completed and returned from patients and 91 from their families. All patients surveyed had temporal lobe epilepsy and had been followed for longer than 2 years after resective surgery. Patients and their families rated overall QOL as having markedly improved following surgery. However, they rated social domains of QOL, including role activities, financial status, and social and family relationships as having improved relatively little. Despite freedom from seizures, a few patients' families were dissatisfied with the patients' post-operative status, primarily for psychosocial reasons. Patients operated on at a later age reported little gains in life satisfaction following surgery. This study supports the conclusion that surgical intervention should occur before patients are subjected to the psychological conflicts and social handicaps associated with chronic intractable epilepsy.