Brain Structure Network Study In Children With Epilepsy

Purpose:Childhood absence epilepsy(CAE)is the most common pediatric epilepsy syndrome,characterized by frequent and transient impairment of consciousness.In the latest International League Against Epilepsy(ILAE)classification,epilepsy has been shown to be a network disease.In this study,we used diffusion tensor imaging(DTI)techinique to explore the alterations of structural brain network in CAE and their association with clinical characteristics of the illness.Method:Twenty one individuals with CAE and twenty four age-and gender-matched healthy controls were scanned with diffusion-weighted MRI.Whole-brain structural network was constructed for each participant based on probabilistic tractography.Topological metrics were then evaluated using graph theoretical analysis,and compared between groups.Results:The strength,efficiency and small-world properties of structural network in CAE were seriously damaged.At the whole brain level,decreased strength,global efficiency,local efficiency,clustering coefficient,normalized clustering coefficient and small-worldness values of the network were detected in CAE compared to controls while the values of characteristic path length and normalized characteristic path length were abnormally increased.At the regional level,especially,the prominent regions of bilateral precuneus showed reduced nodal efficiency and the reduction of efficiency was significantly correlated with disease duration.Conclusion:The current results demonstrate significant alterations of structural networks in CAE patients and the impairments tend to grow worse over time.Our findings may provide a new way to understand the pathophysiology mechanism of CAE and its comorbidities...