Electrical cortical stimulation can impair production of the alphabet without impairing counting

Neurosurgery has the potential to cure patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy, but carries the risk of permanent language impairment when surgery involves the dominant hemisphere of the brain. This risk can be estimated and minimized using electrical stimulation mapping (ESM), which uses cognitive and linguistic tasks during cortical ESM to differentiate “eloquent” and “resectable” areas in the brain. One such task, counting, is often used to screen and characterize language during ESM in patients whose language abilities are limited. Here we report a patient with drug-resistant epilepsy arising from the language-dominant hemisphere using fMRI. Our patient experienced loss of the ability to recite or write the alphabet, but not to count, during ESM of the dominant left posterior superior temporal gyrus. This selective impairment extended to both spoken and written production. We suggest the need for caution when using counting as a sole means to screen language function and as a method of testing low functioning patients using ESM.