Role of Functional Imaging Techniques to Assess Motor and Language Cortical Plasticity in Glioma Patients: A Systematic Review.

Role of Functional Imaging Techniques to Assess Motor and Language Cortical Plasticity in Glioma Patients: A Systematic Review. Neural Plast. 2019;2019:4056436 Authors: Cirillo S, Caulo M, Pieri V, Falini A, Castellano A Abstract Cerebral plasticity is the ability of the central nervous system to reorganize itself in response to different injuries. The reshaping of functional areas is a crucial mechanism to compensate for damaged function. It is acknowledged that functional remodeling of cortical areas may occur also in glioma patients. Principal limits of previous investigations on cortical plasticity of motor and language functions included scarce reports of longitudinal evaluations and limited sample sizes. This systematic review is aimed at elucidating cortical brain plasticity for motor and language functions, in adult glioma patients, by means of preoperative and intraoperative mapping techniques. We systematically reviewed the literature for prospective studies, assessing cortical plasticity of motor and language functions in low-grade and high-grade gliomas. Eight longitudinal studies investigated cortical plasticity, evaluated by motor and language task-based functional MRI (fMRI), motor navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (n-TMS), and intraoperative mapping with cortical direct electrocortical stimulation (DES) of language and motor function. Motor function reorganization appeared relatively limited and mostly chara...
Source: Neural Plasticity - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neural Plast Source Type: research