Abstract
Background and Purpose The pathology of juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) is related to thalamocortical
dysfunction, and the putamen is closely related to the thalamocortical circuit. The
purpose of this study is to evaluate the microstructure of the thalamo-cortico-striatal
circuit in JME patients using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
Materials and Methods This case–control study was conducted on 13 patients with JME (10 females and 3 males
with a mean age of 23.38 ± 4.75 years) and 9 age- and sex-matched volunteers as control
subjects. All subjects underwent DTI and conventional magnetic resonance imaging.
The data were then processed via denoising, registration, and segmentation of the
internal capsule and right and left putamen using the FMRIB Software Library (FSL).
The FSL was also used to calculate the different anisotropy measures: the fractional
anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD), longitudinal diffusivity (LD), and radial
diffusivity (RD).
Results The patients with JME had lower FA and higher LD in the thalamocortical tracts and
lower MD in the frontal corticospinal tracts than the control subjects (p = 0.014, 0.001, and 0.04, respectively). No other significant differences were detected
between the patients with JME and control subjects. The values measured in the right
putamen were not significantly different from those measured in the left putamen in
either the patients or controls.
Conclusion This study demonstrates that microstructural abnormalities occur in the thalamocortical
tracts but not the putamen of patients with JME. Nevertheless, microstructural asymmetry
was not observed in the patients with JME.
Keywords
epilepsy - diffusion - fractional anisotropy - putamen - thalamocortical - white matter
- asymmetry
