Abstracts

We aim to investigate the chemical integrity of the thalami in patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) with different times of disease using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS). We performed multi-voxel 1H-MRS with TE of 30 ms (PRESS sequence) at 1.5 Tesla scanner over the thalami of 14 patients with 1-10 years of clinical history of JME and 16 patients with more than 10 years of disease (mean age = 21.3 vs. 31.5 and mean time of disease = 6.4 vs. 21.8, respectively). All patients had a typical history of JME, typical EEG findings and normal high-resolution magnetic resonance neuroimaging. We determined ratios for peak values of N-acetylaspartate (NAA), choline, glutamine-glutamate and inositol over creatine-phosphocreatine (Cr). Thalamic NAA/Cr ratios were decreased in JME patients with longer time of disease (right side = 1.4722 [plusmn] 0.2724; left side = 1.4817 [plusmn] 0.2206) compared to patients with less than 10 years of disease (right side = 1.8484 [plusmn] 0.2249; left side = 1.6903 [plusmn] 0.2539) with [italic]p[/italic] values of 0.0004 and 0.0254, respectively. We did not find significantly differences of the other metabolites between both groups. These results are suggestive of progressive thalamic neuronal damage directly associated with time of disease in patients with JME. (Supported by CAPES/CNPq.)