Epilepsy-Related Brain Atrophy Predicted by Brain Networks

 A link has been determined between a brain networks connections and gray matter atrophy in an international study. Researchers found that areas of high atrophy in individuals with both idiopathic generalized epilepsy and temporal lobe epilepsy also tended to be hub regions for brain networks. Further analyses showed the model could predict the damage from epilepsy to the grey matter of individual patients over time.
 
“Hub regions are known to participate in brain signaling, have high plasticity, and high metabolic activity areas, making them a candidate for epilepsy-related atrophy,” says Sara Larivière, the study’s lead author and a PhD candidate at The Neuro(Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital). 
 
Researchers from the Neuro analyzed data from 1,021 individuals with epilepsy and 1,564 individuals without epilepsy from a collection of neuroimaging data available from Open Science principles, the ENIGMA database. The data was used to map grey matter atrophy in the individuals. More data was collected from the Human Connectome Project, which provides connectome data from a large group of healthy controls. Their hypothesis was that grey matter atrophy would appear most often in parts of the brain where connectivity was highest. 

“Our multi-site findings show that brain connectivity contributes to the effect that epilepsy has on whole brain structure,” says Boris Bernhardt, a researcher at The Neuro and the study’s senior author. “This will be important to understand common functional deficits in individual patients and to assess the effect of the disease over time.”