Study On Brain Network Of Benign Childhood Epilepsy With Centrotemporal Spikes Based On Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes(BECTS)is the most common type of idiopathic epilepsy in children,which accounts for about 15-25% of pediatric epilepsy patients.Electroencephalography(EEG)has revealed that epileptiform discharges are localized to the centrotemporal region(Rolandic region).Characteristically the onset of this disorder ranges from 4 to 10 years old.The seizures predictably occur during sleep,often in the early morning hours,and occasionally in the daytime.In the last 10 years,there were several studies indicating that patients with BECTS had a variety of cognitive disorders including language impairment,memory dysfunction,visuomotor impairments and so on.These abnormalities may be associated with age,frequency of seizures,duration of disease,antiepileptic drugs and social factors.We collected 48 patients with BECTS and 21 healthy controls.The BECTS patients were divided into medication group(n = 22 cases)and untreated group(n = 26 cases).In order to investigate the brain functional network of patients with BECTS,we intend to study from the perspective of large-scale brain network and resting brain network.First,the 90 time series were extracted from the smoothed data based on the anatomical regions.Then,paired correlation analysis was performed within the regions in each subject respectively.Then we analyzed the network‘s connectivity strength,network properties and node properties.By directly comparing the edges of the network,the main differences between the three groups appeared in the edges within the default mode network(DMN)and the edges connected to the SN.Further analysis revealed that the node properties of occipital lobe,insula and some frontal lobe nodes were significantly changed.These findings suggested that BECTS patients did have large-scale network changes in the whole brain,and antiepileptic drugs had an impact on the network changes and cognitive dysfunction.At the same time,we found that the three groups of subjects had a small world feature,but there was no significant difference in the global network feature.The brain activity of the resting state is thought to reflect the nature of the pathophysiological abnormalities of many psychiatric disorders.We added the resting brain network analysis to our work.We used the method of group independent component analysis(GICA)and functional network connectivity(FNC)to analyze the resting brain functional network of BECTS.We identified 11 resting networks in three groups to study the differences in brain network connectivity between groups.Our findings suggested that the loss of connectivity between right lateral frontoparietal network(r FPN)and left lateral frontoparietal network(lFPN),and the loss of connectivity between FPN and primary sensory systems.Antiepileptic drug therapy can effectively increase the association between FPN and primary sensory systems,but lead to the loss of connectivity between the FPN and the anterior part of the default mode network(aDMN).Based on these findings,we speculate that there is a lack of coupling within the FPN and between the FPN and the primary sensory system in patients with BECTS,and that antiepileptic drugs can improve the coupling between the FPN and the primary sensory system.The further reduction in cognitive function after treatment may be associated with the loss of connectivity between FPN and DMN.Our work has studied the brain function network of BECTS patients from the perspective of large-scale brain network and the resting brain network.The results showed altered functional connectivity between BECTS patients and healthy controls,and between the two groups of patients.Altered functional connectivity may mainly reflect the dysfunction of brain information interaction,which may reveal the potential neuropathological mechanism of epilepsy and the effect of antiepileptic drugs on the brain network of epilepsy patients.