Brief CommunicationAdvanced morphological neuroimaging study in lateral temporal lobe epilepsy: A multicentric study

•This is the first multicentric study on patients with sporadic lateral temporal lobe epilepsy with a multimodal voxel-based MRI approach.•No significant gray matter alterations were found in patients with sporadic lateral temporal lobe epilepsy using multimodal MRI approach.•Multi-center studies showed a high reliability in investigating rare phenotypes of lateral temporal lobe epilepsy.•Further studies with larger cohorts and other imaging techniques are needed to detect potential biomarkers of this rare epileptic condition.

Lateral temporal lobe epilepsy (lTLE) is a rare condition characterized by auditory auras or receptive aphasia, negative MRI, and relatively benign evolution. With the low number of cases in the world, our objective was to analyze a cohort of sporadic cases with lTLE (slTLE), in order to investigate possible cerebral morphological alterations. Forty patients with lTLE (34.93 ± 12.08 years of age) and 38 healthy controls (CTRL, 34.55 ± 9.08 years of age) were enrolled from four tertiary Italian epilepsy centers, which provided brain MRI T1-weighted images following a standard protocol for patients with epilepsy. We performed group comparison by following different approaches: voxel-based morphometry (VBM, SPM8), cortical thickness (CT), and local gyrification index (lGI) (FreeSurfer 5.3). At a more conservative threshold (p < 0.05, FWE correction), no significant differences between groups survived, neither in VBM nor CT/lGI. Multicenter studies have more power than smaller studies in conducting sophisticated evaluations of rare diseases, and further investigations are required to develop a full picture of this rare phenotype.