| Epilepsy is a common disease in the nervous system with great harm. The pathogenesis of idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE) has no identifiable cause other than a genetic predisposition. It is characterized by the widespread distribution of spike waves on EEG and the undetection of focal brain anatomical abnormalities. Generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCS) is the most common subtype of idiopathic generalized epilepsy. The attack showed severe convulsions which lead to cognitive impairments in patients with epilepsy, such as attention, memory, and language dysfunction. Although great efforts have been made in the past decades, changes in spontaneous neuronal functional organization in GTCS needs to be further explored.Therefore, the study introduces functional connectivity density (FCD) method and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS) approach to investigate the changes of the functional and structural brain abnormalities caused by epilepsy. The results showed significantly increased long-range FCD in the cerebellum anterior lobe and sensorimotor areas as well as decreased long-range FCD in the middle and inferior temporal, prefrontal, and inferior parietal cortices. In addition, there are significant Pearson correlations between aberrant FCDs and duration of disease. As for structural changes,voxel-wise statistics revealed five brain white matter tracts with lower fractional anisotropy (FA) inpatients compared to healthy subjects in the genu and body of corpus callosum, the bilateral anterior corona radiata and the right posterior corona radiata. Moreover, negative correlations were found in all those significantly reduced regions. What’s more, the detected functional connectivity alterations have been hypothesized to be associated with cognitive impairment and motor control. Our study provides new evidence for the pathophysiology of IGE-GTCS. |
PDF Full Text Request