Brain network alteration in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy with cognitive impairment

The aims of this study were to investigate the brain network alternation in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) with and without cognitive impairment (CI) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and to further explore the potential mechanisms of epilepsy-induced CI. Forty patients with TLE and nineteen healthy controls (HCs) were recruited for this study. All participants received the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test, and the patients were divided into CI (n = 21) and cognitive nonimpairment (CNI) groups (n = 19) according to MoCA performance. Functional connectivity (FC) differences of resting state networks (RSNs) were compared among the CI, CNI, and HC groups. Correlation between FC and MoCA scores was also observed. When compared with the HC group, significantly decreased FC between medial visual network (mVN) and left frontoparietal network (lFPN) as well as between visuospatial network (VSN) and the anterior default mode network (aDMN) were revealed in both CI and CNI groups. In addition, significantly decreased FC between lFPN and executive control network (ECN) and increased FC between ECN and sensorimotor-related network (SMN) were found in CNI and CI groups, respectively. When compared with the CNI group, the CI group exhibited significant increased FC between ECN and lFPN as well as between ECN and SMN. Moreover, in the CI group, FC between ECN and lFPN showed negative correlation with attention scores. Our findings suggested that cognitive networks are different from epileptic networks, and the increased FC between RSNs closely related to cognitive function changes may help us to further understand the mechanism of CI in TLE.