More extensive structural damage in temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis type 1

Objective: To explore clinical and structural differences between mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) patients with different hippocampal sclerosis (HS) subtypes.

Methods: High-resolution T1-weighted MRI and diffusion tensor imaging data were obtained in 41 refractory mTLE patients and 52 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Postoperative histopathological examination confirmed HS type 1 in 30 patients and HS type 2 in eleven patients. Clinical features, postoperative seizure outcomes, hippocampal subfields volumes, fractional anisotropy (FA) values of white matter regions and graph theory parameters were explored and compared between the HS type 1 and HS type 2 groups.

Results: No significant differences in clinical features and postsurgical seizure outcomes were found between the HS type 1 and type 2 groups. However, the HS type 1 group showed extra atrophy in ipsilateral parasubiculum than healthy controls and more severe atrophy in contralateral hippocampal fissure than the HS type 2 group. More extensive FA decrease were also observed in the HS type 1 group, involving ipsilateral optic radiation, superior fronto-occipital fasciculus, contralateral uncinate fasciculus, tapetum, bilateral hippocampal cingulum, corona radiata, etc. Furthermore, in spite of similar impairments in characteristic path length, global efficiency and local efficiency in two HS groups, the HS type 1 group showed additional decrease of clustering coefficient than healthy controls.

Conclusions: HS type 1 and 2 groups had similar clinical characteristics and postoperative seizure outcomes. More widespread neuronal cell loss in the HS type 1 group contributed to more extensive structural damage and connectivity abnormality. These results shed new light on the imaging correlates of different HS pathology.