Epilepsy duration, febrile seizures, and cerebral glucose metabolism.

Purpose: Studies using magnetic resonance imaging have shown that reduced hippocampal volume is associated with a history of febrile seizures, the duration of epilepsy, and the number of generalized tonic-clonic seizures. It is uncertain whether these factors have the same influence on functional as on structural measures of the integrity of the epileptogenic zone.

Methods: We used positron emission tomography (PET) with fluorine 18 2-deoxyglucose to study 91 patients with temporal lobe seizure foci localized by ictal video-EEG.

A Korean kindred with autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy and mental retardation.

Background: A Korean family had distinctive clinical and neuroimaging features and carried the same genetic mutation that was found in a previously described Japanese kindred with autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy.

Objective: To describe the first Korean family with autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy.

Methods: Members of a large family, including 9 affected individuals from 3 generations, underwent a comprehensive genetic, clinical, electroencephalographic, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging evaluation.

Developmental aspects of language processing: fMRI of verbal fluency in children and adults.

We examined developmental differences, in location and extent of fMRI language activation maps, between adults and children while performing a semantic fluency task. We studied 29 adults and 16 children with echo planar imaging BOLD fMRI at 1.5 T using covert semantic verbal fluency (generation of words to categories compared to rest) using a block design.

Organization of language networks in children: functional magnetic resonance imaging studies.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a relatively new neuroimaging procedure that has been used to study a wide variety of cognitive phenomena in adults, including attention, language, and memory. More recently, this technique has been successfully applied to pediatric populations as well. In particular, many investigators have employed fMRI as a tool to study language development in normal children.

Total cerebral volume is reduced in patients with localization-related epilepsy and a history of complex febrile seizures.

Context: Febrile seizures may lead to later epilepsy. They have been associated with hippocampal atrophy but their effect on total cerebral volume is unknown.

Objective: To compare total cerebral volume in patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy with and without a history of complex febrile seizures (CFS).

Neuroimaging reveals automatic speech coding during perception of written word meaning.

The extent to which visual word perception engages speech codes (i.e., phonological recoding) remains a crucial question in understanding mechanisms of reading.

Neuroimaging and the progression of epilepsy.

Several lines of evidence can be used to try to answer the question of whether epilepsy is a progressive disease, and whether persistent seizures, or the underlying process itself, cause neuronal injury. The results of clinical studies have been inconclusive. Neuroimaging studies offer a quantitative approach.

A functional magnetic resonance imaging study of left hemisphere language dominance in children.

Background: Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a noninvasive method of assessing language dominance in a pediatric population.

Objective: To determine the pattern of receptive language lateralization in healthy children.

Design: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess an auditory language task in 11 children (7 girls, 4 boys; mean age, 8.

The utility of functional magnetic resonance imaging in epilepsy and language.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is a viable presurgical tool for use with the pediatric epilepsy population as replacement for the intra-carotid sodium amobarbital test (IAT) used to identify hemispheric language dominance. This paper reviews the current imaging research on the identification of language cortex in pediatric epilepsy patients and in normal children. A review of the literature comparing fMRI to the IAT and electrocortical stimulation suggests that fMRI reliably identifies the dominant hemisphere, with pediatric and adult studies producing comparable results.