Neuromagnetic evidence of impaired cortical auditory processing in pediatric intractable epilepsy.
OBJECTIVE
We aimed to determine the changes in neural correlates of auditory information processing such as auditory detection, encoding, and sensory discrimination in pediatric patients with intractable epilepsy.


METHODS
In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, 10 patients and 10 age- and gender-matched healthy controls were investigated with the multi-feature mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm. Latencies and amplitudes of M100, M150, M200, and MMN event-related fields were evaluated.


RESULTS
All event-related fields in response to standard stimuli (M100, M150 and M200) and responses to occasional five deviant sounds, deviating from the standard stimuli either in duration, frequency, intensity, location, or by including a silent gap were reduced in amplitude in epilepsy patients compared with healthy controls.


CONCLUSIONS
Our study suggests that auditory information processing is impaired in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, being evident both in stimulus feature encoding (as reflected by changes of early event-related components, e.g., M100) and in cortical sound discrimination (as reflected by MMNm). The neural changes involving diminished M100 as well as MMNms for all five deviant sound types suggest wide-spread auditory information processing impairments in these patients.
Korostenskaja
Milena
M
Division of Neurology, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH 45229, USA. milena.korostenskaja@cchmc.org
Pardos
Maria
M
Fujiwara
Hisako
H
Kujala
Teija
T
Horn
Paul
P
Rose
Douglas
D
Byars
Anna
A
Brown
David
D
Seo
Joo Hee
JH
Wang
Yingying
Y
Vannest
Jennifer
J
Xiang
Jing
J
Degrauw
Ton
T
Näätänen
Risto
R
Lee
Ki H
KH
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000293:Adolescent; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D016022:Case-Control Studies; D002648:Child; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000209:etiology*; D003265:Contingent Negative Variation / Q000502:physiology; D018450:Disease Progression; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000150:complications* / Q000473:pathology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D007360:Intelligence / Q000502:physiology; D015225:Magnetoencephalography / Q000379:methods; D008297:Male; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010372:Pediatrics; D013223:Statistics as Topic