INTRODUCTION Malformations of cortical development (MCDs) are increasingly recognized as important cause of epilepsy, especially refractory epilepsy. In developing countries like India, where the facilities for sophisticated imaging are not easily accessible to all, the prevalence and the types of cortical malformations are largely unknown. Hence this preliminary study has been undertaken to ex...

Objective The aim of this study is to determine whether the use of 7 tesla (T) MRI in clinical practice leads to higher detection rates of focal cortical dysplasias in possible candidates for epilepsy surgery. Methods In our center patients are referred for 7 T MRI if lesional focal epilepsy is suspected, but no abnormalities are detected at one or more previous, sufficient-quality lower-fiel...

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurring seizures. It is physiologically characterized by abnormal, excessive and self-terminating discharges from neurons. Epilepsy affects more than 0.5 % of the world's population and has a large genetic component. The most common human genetic epilepsies display a complex pattern of inheritance and the identity of the susceptibility gene...

PURPOSE Hypothalamic hamartoma (HH) related epilepsy presents with gelastic seizures (GS), other seizure types and cognitive deterioration. Although seizure origin in GS has been well established, non-GS are poorly characterized. Their relationship with the HH and cognitive deterioration remains poorly understood. We analyzed seizure type, spread pattern in non-GS and their relationship with th...

Introduction: about 20% to 30% of patients with epilepsy are diagnosed with drug-resistant epilepsy and one third of these are candidates for epilepsy surgery. Surgical resection of the epileptogenic tissue is a well-established method for treating patients with intractable focal epilepsy. Determining language laterality and locality is an important part of a comprehensive epilepsy program befo...

Anxiety disorders represent a prevalent psychiatric comorbidity in both adults and children with epilepsy for which the etiology remains controversial. Neurobiological contributions have been suggested, but only limited evidence suggests abnormal brain volumes particularly in children with epilepsy and anxiety. Since the brain develops in an organized fashion, covariance analyses between differ...

background: imaging studies performed in research centers suggest a high prevalence of brain structural abnormalities in patients with epilepsy. however, the results of research studies may not be directly applicable to general clinic, because they may perform on patients with high probability of cerebral abnormalities. on the other hand, more advanced modalities are likely to be used in resear...

BACKGROUND It is of clinical importance to localize pathologic brain tissue in epilepsy. Noninvasive localization of cortical areas associated with interictal epileptiform spikes may provide important information to facilitate presurgical planning for intractable epilepsy patients. METHODS A cortical potential imaging (CPI) technique was used to deconvolve the smeared scalp potentials into th...

We used transcranial magnetic stimulation to investigate whether the cortical excitability changes observed amongst the different generalized and focal epilepsy syndromes are reflected in their asymptomatic siblings and if these changes depended on the clinical phenotype. We studied 157 patients with epilepsy (95 generalized and 62 focal) and their asymptomatic siblings (138 and 82, respectivel...