Abstracts

Patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) show normal brain MRI. To investigate the abnormality of cerebral perfusion in patients with JME, statistical parametric mapping (SPM) was performed between SPECT images of patients and controls. ^99mTc-ethyl cysteinate dimer brain SPECT was performed in 25 JME patients (21.1[plusmn]5.0 years) and 25 age [amp] sex-matched 25 controls (23.0[plusmn]4.4 years). For SPM analysis, all SPECT images of patients and controls were spatially normalized to the standard SPECT template, then smoothed with 14-mm full width at half maximum gaussian kernel. The [italic]t[/italic]-test was performed for comparison between two groups. The height threshold was set to uncorrected [italic]P[/italic][lt]0.005, and extent threshold was set to [italic]K[/italic][sub]E[/sub] [gt]50. The JME group showed singificant interictal hypoperfusion in right superior temporal gyrus (x,y,z:68,-12,8, BA=42, [italic]P[/italic]=0.004; x,y,z:36,10,-20, BA=38, [italic]P[/italic]=0.001), right fusiform gyrus (x,y,z:48,-34,-12, BA=37,[italic] P[/italic]=0.001), right middle frontal gyrus (x,y,z:60,22,30, BA=9,[italic] P[/italic]=0.001), and left middle temporal gyrus (x,y,z:60,22,30, BA=9,[italic] P[/italic]=0.001) but there was no brain regions showing interictal hyperperfusion.[figure1] JME patients showed decresaed cerebral perfusion in right frontal lobe and bilateral temporal lobes. Absence of interictal hyperperfusion suggesting neuronal irritability may be related to the use of antiepileptic drugs in most of the patients. (Supported by a grant (no. HMP-03-PJ1-PG3-21300-0033) of the Good Health R[amp]D Project, Ministry of Health [amp] Welfare, Republic of Korea.)