Immature mammals are widely believed to compensate functionally for nervous system alterations better than adults with comparable disorders. Embryos restitute huge losses, but plasticity, remodeling, or use of alternate mechanisms said to underly compensation in injured infants are not understood. Toward understanding these, the effects of ablating or altering parts of the nervous system in inf...

Rasmussen syndrome affects previously normal people and forever changes their lives and the lives of their families. Although understood as a probable autoimmune condition, medical treatment remains limited and surgery remains the only cure, although with inevitable functional consequences. Difficulties remain in deciding on the optimal timing of surgery. Here, we review data available to aid c...

PURPOSE Acute post-operative seizures (APOS) after epilepsy surgery, previously believed to be benign, are increasingly associated with poor long-term prognosis. Prior literature has focused primarily on adult temporal lobe epilepsy. This retrospective study aimed to identify the prevalence, prognostic significance and risk factors for APOS in pediatric epilepsy surgery at a single center. ME...

We analyzed postsurgery linguistic outcomes of 43 hemispherectomy patients operated on at UCLA. We rated spoken language (Spoken Language Rank, SLR) on a scale from 0 (no language) to 6 (mature grammar) and examined the effects of side of resection/damage, age at surgery/seizure onset, seizure control postsurgery, and etiology on language development. Etiology was defined as developmental (cort...

Blindsight is a visual phenomenon whereby hemianopic patients are able to process visual information in their blind visual field without awareness. Previous research demonstrating the existence of blindsight in hemianopic patients has been criticized for the nature of the paradigms used, for the presence of methodological artifacts, and for the possibility that spared islands of visual cortex m...

BACKGROUND Functional hemispherectomy (FH) is mainly performed in children with catastrophic epilepsies and pre-existing severe hemiparesis. It is accepted that mainly patients at young ages with more or less complete loss of their hand function are suitable candidates for FH. However, we feel that FH should be considered also in some adults with devastating unilateral epilepsy syndromes. PAT...

Children with unilobar or multilobar pathology issuing in refractory epilepsy are potential candidates for surgical treatment. Extensive surgery results in good seizure control, but it also increases the risk of neurological deficits as well as motor and mental problems. We reviewed the cases of 19 children with refractory epilepsy treated surgically at Osaka University Hospital. Four of the 19...

Does a post-lesional rewiring exist in the central nervous system (CNS)? Whereas neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques illustrate the extensive cortical reshaping after a brain injury, the remodeling of ascending and descending neuronal pathway is more difficult to be investigated. Here, we discuss how the studies dealing with hemispherectomy (HS) can provide interesting information about...