Can we predict drug response by volumes of the corpus callosum in newly diagnosed focal epilepsy?

Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate whether volumes of the corpus callosum could predict a response to antiepileptic drugs in patients with newly diagnosed focal epilepsy.

Methods: Fifty-three patients with newly diagnosed focal epilepsy of unknown etiology and healthy subjects were enrolled in this study. First, we analyzed the differences in the volumes of the corpus callosum between patients with epilepsy and healthy subjects. Second, we divided patients with epilepsy into antiepileptic drug responders and drug nonresponders groups, according to their seizure controls, and evaluated the differences in the volumes of the corpus callosum between the groups. Third, we conducted correlation analyses between the volumes of the corpus callosum and mean diffusion measures in healthy subjects.

Results: The volumes of the corpus callosum in patients with epilepsy were significantly lower than those in normal controls (=.0001). Among epilepsy patients, the volumes of the corpus callosum were significantly lower in antiepileptic drug responders compared with nonresponders (=.0481), which was the only independent variable for predicting antiepileptic drug response (OR = 10.07, =.0434). In addition, we found that the volumes of the corpus callosum were significantly correlated with the mean diffusion measures (fractional anisotropy,  = .408, =.0027; mean diffusivity,  = -0.403, =.0028) in normal controls.

Conclusions: We demonstrated that the volumes of the corpus callosum were different according to antiepileptic drug responses in patients with newly diagnosed focal epilepsy, which might suggest that the volumes of the corpus callosum could be a new biomarker for predicting responses to antiepileptic drugs.