Structural brain changes in drug-resistant juvenile myoclonic epilepsy : Neurología.com – Neurología.com

An investigation carried out by Universidad CES, Universidad de Antioquía and Instituto Neurológico de Colombia has sought to determine changes in brain structures, both cortical and subcortical, in patients with drug-resistant juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME), in order to contribute to the knowledge of the characteristics of drug-resistant syndrome and provide possible answers and hypotheses for new studies and more appropriate treatments. This observational case-control study, published in Revista de Neurología, has defined a convenience sample size of four cases and 16 healthy controls to guarantee the viability of the project. Data collected for drug-resistant JME patients comes from a 1.5 T MRI scanner. FreeSurfer software was used to determine cortical and subcortical areas in both drug-resistant JME and healthy controls. A total of 20 study participants were included, of whom four (20%) were drug-resistant JMEs and 16 (80%) healthy controls. The location of the clusters with statistically significant differences in cortical thickness is found in the precentral gyrus, the superior temporal gyrus, the transverse temporal gyrus, the medial temporal gyrus and the supramarginal gyrus, predominantly in the left hemisphere. Given these results, the authors conclude that structural brain changes are evident in patients with drug-resistant JME that may go unnoticed by conventional techniques in the processing of magnetic resonance images.