Right fronto-limbic atrophy is associated with reduced empathy in refractory unilateral mesial temporal lobe epilepsy

Publication date: Available online 9 September 2015 Source:Neuropsychologia Author(s): Gianina Toller, Babu Adhimoolam, Katherine P. Rankin, Hans-Jürgen Huppertz, Martin Kurthen, Hennric Jokeit Refractory mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE) is the most frequent focal epilepsy and is often accompanied by deficits in social cognition including emotion recognition, theory of mind, and empathy. Consistent with the neuronal networks that are crucial for normal social-cognitive processing, these impairments have been associated with functional changes in fronto-temporal regions. However, although atrophy in unilateral MTLE also affects regions of the temporal and frontal lobes that underlie social cognition, little is known about the structural correlates of social-cognitive deficits in refractory MTLE. In the present study, a psychometrically validated empathy questionnaire was combined with whole-brain voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate the relationship between self-reported affective and cognitive empathy and gray matter volume in 55 subjects (13 patients with right MTLE, 9 patients with left MTLE, and 33 healthy controls). Consistent with the brain regions underlying social cognition, our results show that lower affective and cognitive empathy was associated with smaller volume in predominantly right fronto-limbic regions, including the right hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, thalamus, fusiform gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus, dorsomedial and dorsol...

Source: Neuropsychologia - September 9, 2015 Category: Neurology Source Type: research