Neuroimaging Findings in Children with Cerebral Palsy – Risk Assessment for Symptomatic Epilepsy

Abstract

Neuroimaging plays a key role in the diagnosis of cerebral palsy (CP), as it helps to understand the etiology and pathogenesis of neurological impairment.

The aim of the study is to demonstrate the role of neuroimaging in assessing the risk for epilepsy in children with CP with various lesions in CT and MRI with a focus on neuroimaging findings in full-term and premature children and their risk for epilepsy.

The study includes 521 children with CP, diagnosed in the Clinic of Child Neurology, UMHATNP “St. Naum” between 2008 and 2018. Two hundred and twenty children underwent MRI of the brain, 464 of the cases had CT, and 127 had both MRI and CT. Various pathological lesions in MRI (brain malformations, lesions in the white or gray matter, lesions in the basal ganglia, cystic lesions, cortical atrophy, ventriculomegaly) were found in all patients with CP and symptomatic epilepsy, while 5.8% of those children with CP without epilepsy had normal MRI. Normal findings were observed in CT in 7.5% of the children with CP and epilepsy, while this result reached 12.1% when children did not have epilepsy. Among the abnormal findings in MRI with the highest relative risk for symptomatic epilepsy were ventriculomegaly RR – 1.296 (95% CI 1.149–1.463), cortical atrophy RR – 1.235 (95% CI 1.082–1.410) and lesions in the gray matter RR – 1.210 (95% CI 1.056–1.387). When comparing the types of the lesions in MRI in full-term and premature children with CP, we observed that white matter lesions predominated in premature children, while grey matter lesions in full-term children, which explains the higher incidence of epilepsy in full-term children.

We found a higher incidence of pathological lesions in neuroimaging studies in patients with CP and concomitant epilepsy compared to those without epilepsy, as well as a high relative risk for epilepsy in patients with ventriculomegaly, cortical atrophy, and gray matter lesions.