OBJECTIVE Temporal intermittent rhythmic delta activity (TIRDA) is an EEG pattern characterized by sinusoidal trains of activity, ranging from 1 to 3.5 Hz, and well localized over the temporal regions. It is considered to be an indicator of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), but full agreement between different authors has still not been reached. The aim of this study was therefore to assess the rol...

High resolution MRI is very important in the evaluations of patients with intractable temporal lobe epilepsy in preoperative investigations. Morphologic abnormalities on cranial MRI usually indicate the epileptogenic focus. Intractable TLE patients who have normal cranial MRI or bilateral hippocampal atrophy may have a chance for surgery if a certain epileptogenic focus is determined. We evalua...

OBJECTIVE The authors aimed to determine the ability of resting-state functional connectivity MRI (fcMRI) to lateralise/localise the epileptogenic zone in patients presenting with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) at the individual level. METHODS Basal functional connectivity (BFC) was evaluated in each hemisphere of 22 MTLE patients. 200 volumes were acquired using a single-shot GE-EPI se...

OBJECT Supratentorial cortical ependymomas (CE) are rare, with 7 cases reported. The lesions, typically occurring in the superficial cortex in young adults and associated with a history of seizures, are not fully characterized. Furthermore, their relationship with the recently described angiocentric glioma (AG) is still being debated. This study was undertaken to summarize the authors' experien...

I read with great interest the study by van Tuijl et al. aimed to investigate the anti-epileptogenic effect of levetiracetam in stroke patients in order to prevent poststroke seizures and epilepsy. However, due to several problems encountered during execution of this trial, the authors concluded that this trial seems not feasible. On the basis of the similarity of the cascade of synaptic and in...

Phenobarbital produces its anti-epileptic actions by increasing the inhibitory drive of γ-aminobutyric acid. However, following recurrent seizures, γ-aminobutyric acid excites neurons because of a persistent increase of chloride raising the important issue of whether phenobarbital could aggravate persistent seizures. Here we compared the actions of phenobarbital on initial and established ictal...

Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a non-invasive method to measure cerebral tissue oxygenation continuously with an adhesive optode system which can be easily placed on the skin. We coupled NIRS with video-electroencephalography (video-EEG) during the presurgical evaluation of two patients with intractable localization-related epilepsy of mesial temporal origin. Cerebral oxygen saturation wa...

BACKGROUND Children with focal epilepsy unresponsive to anticonvulsant therapy may become surgical candidates. Inter-ictal SPECT (SPECT-IN) studies demonstrate an area of hypoperfusion within the seizure focus in up to 50% of patients. The goal of this study was to evaluate the usefulness of corregistration of MR and SPECT-IN images for localization of the epileptogenic focus. MATERIAL/METHOD...