We studied a group of eleven patients with untreated CAE and eleven matched controls using resting-state fMRI. We measured functional connectivity between every pair of voxels and generated images of 鈥渨hole-brain鈥?functional connectivity by counting the number of functional connections of each voxel.
There were marked differences between CAE patients and controls in whole brain functional connectivity. The patients had decreased connectivity in the thalamus and basal ganglia and increased connectivity in the medial occipital cortex.
These findings suggest enduring changes in function of the thalamus and the cortex in CAE patients even when there is no GSW activity. These human functional connectivity data support the findings in animal models of involvement of cortex as well as thalamus in absence epilepsy.