ABSTRACT
Functional transcranial Doppler sonography was used to study hemispheric language dominance (HLD) in 24 right-handed patients with left temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and a structural lesion in the left temporal lobe and in 69 healthy controls. Twenty-five percent of the patients and 4% of controls showed atypical (right or bilateral) HLD. Degree of HLD was not correlated with age, Full Scale IQ, Verbal IQ, spike frequency, seizure frequency, age at seizure onset, or duration of TLE. Atypical HLD appears to be lesion-induced, independent of epilepsy characteristics.
Subject(s)
Dominance, Cerebral , Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe/physiopathology , Hippocampus/physiopathology , Language , Neuronal Plasticity , Adolescent , Adult , Case-Control Studies , Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe/diagnostic imaging , Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe/surgery , Female , Humans , Male , Middle Aged , Preoperative Care , Reference Values , Sclerosis , Ultrasonography, Doppler, TranscranialABSTRACT
Ictal functional transcranial Doppler sonography (I-fTCD) was used to lateralize the ictal onset zone in the presurgical evaluation of two patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. In one patient, I-fTCD and ictal SPECT were performed simultaneously during EEG-monitoring. In both patients, results were concordant with the ictal SPECT findings, PET and semiology. I-fTCD seems to be an interesting new method to non-invasively lateralize the seizure onset zone with high temporal resolution. I-fTCD and SPECT may give complementary information to lateralize the seizure onset zone.
