Advanced morphological neuroimaging study in lateral temporal lobe epilepsy: A multicentric study

Lateral temporal lobe epilepsy (lTLE) is a rare condition characterized by auditory auras or receptive aphasia, negative MRI, and relatively benign evolution. With the low number of cases in the world, our objective was to analyze a cohort of sporadic cases with lTLE (slTLE), in order to investigate possible cerebral morphological alterations. Forty patients with lTLE (34.93 ± 12.08 years of age) and 38 healthy controls (CTRL, 34.55 ± 9.08 years of age) were enrolled from four tertiary Italian epilepsy centers, which provided brain MRI T1-weighted images following a standard protocol for patients with epilepsy. We performed group comparison by following different approaches: voxel-based morphometry (VBM, SPM8), cortical thickness (CT), and local gyrification index (lGI) (FreeSurfer 5.3). At a more conservative threshold (p < 0.05, FWE correction), no significant differences between groups survived, neither in VBM nor CT/lGI. Multicenter studies have more power than smaller studies in conducting sophisticated evaluations of rare diseases, and further investigations are required to develop a full picture of this rare phenotype.