The Metabolic Characteristics in Sublobar Areas of Pharmacoresistant Epilepsy Based on FDG-PET Study

Epilepsy is a chronic brain disease that is caused by various factors and characterized by recurrent, episodic and temporary central nervous system dysfunction. In the past few decades, despite the continuous development of antiepileptic drugs, there are still 20%-30% patients with epilepsy progressing to pharmacoresistant epilepsy (PRE), which leads to a significant increase in the morbidity and mortality of epilepsy. For those fraction of PRE, surgical treatment may be the only possible way to cure epilepsy. Accurate presurgical evaluation play an important role in making surgery decision and defining surgical extent and achieve better surgical outcome. Imaging, especially interictal fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose-positron emission tomography (FDG-PET) is widely used in preoperative evaluation, which is of great significance in the detection of epileptogenic foci. Previous studies on FDG-PET have found that FDG-PET has a wide range of hypometabolism inpatients of PRE varying from different epileptic origins. Therefore, exploring the characteristics of glucose metabolism originating in different brain areas of resistant epilepsy can help to better interpret the results of FDG-PET and guide the preoperative localization of such patiens and better understand the potential mechanism of seizure propagation in PRE.