Language brain dominance in patients with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy: a comparative study between functional magnetic resonance imaging and dichotic listening test.

PURPOSE To identify brain dominance for language functions with DLT and correlate these results with those obtained from fMRI in patients suffering from intractable temporal lobe epilepsy. METHOD This study reports on 13 patients who underwent pre-surgical epileptic evaluation between April and October 2004 at the Epilepsy Surgery Program, Hospital Sao Lucas, PUCRS. In DLT, dominance was assessed through a consonant-vowel task, whereas in fMRI patients performed a verb generation task. RESULTS Our results identified a correlation between the fMRI lateralization index and the DLT ear predominance index and reply difference index (r=0.6, p=0.02; Pearson Correlation Coefficient), showing positive correlation between results obtained from fMRI and DLT. CONCLUSION DLT was found to significantly correlate with fMRI. These findings indicate that DLT (a non-invasive procedure) could be a useful tool to evaluate language brain dominance in pre-surgical epileptic patients as it is cheaper to perform than fMRI.