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Updated: Feb 27, 2026
Anteromesial Temporal Lobectomy for Medically Intractable Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: An Operative Study
Published on: August 15, 2025
A meta-analysis on progressive atrophy in intractable temporal lobe epilepsy: Time is brain?
Lorenzo Caciagli1, Andrea Bernasconi1, Samuel Wiebe1
1From the Neuroimaging of Epilepsy Laboratory (L.C., A.B., N.B., B.C.B.) and Multimodal Imaging and Connectome Analysis Laboratory (B.C.B.), Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, McGill University; Department of Clinical Neurosciences (S.W.), University of Calgary, Canada; and Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy (L.C., M.J.K.), UCL Institute of Neurology, London, UK.
Objective:
It remains unclear whether drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is associated with cumulative brain damage, with no expert consensus and no quantitative syntheses of the available evidence.
Methods:
We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of MRI studies on progressive atrophy, searching PubMed and Ovid MEDLINE databases for cross-sectional and longitudinal quantitative MRI studies on drug-resistant TLE.
Results:
We screened 2,976 records and assessed eligibility of 248 full-text articles. Forty-two articles met the inclusion criteria for quantitative evaluation. We observed a predominance of cross-sectional studies, use of different clinical indices of progression, and high heterogeneity in age-control procedures. Meta-analysis of 18/1 cross-sectional/longitudinal studies on hippocampal atrophy (n = 979 patients) yielded a pooled effect size of r = -0.42 for ipsilateral atrophy related to epilepsy duration (95% confidence interval [CI] -0.51 to -0.32; p < 0.0001; I2 = 65.22%) and r = -0.35 related to seizure frequency (95% CI -0.47 to -0.22; p < 0.0001; I2 = 61.97%). Sensitivity analyses did not change the results. Narrative synthesis of 25/3 cross-sectional/longitudinal studies on whole brain atrophy (n = 1,504 patients) indicated that >80% of articles reported duration-related progression in extratemporal cortical and subcortical regions. Detailed analysis of study design features yielded low to moderate levels of evidence for progressive atrophy across studies, mainly due to dominance of cross-sectional over longitudinal investigations, use of diverse measures of seizure estimates, and absence of consistent age control procedures.
Conclusions:
While the neuroimaging literature is overall suggestive of progressive atrophy in drug-resistant TLE, published studies have employed rather weak designs to directly demonstrate it. Longitudinal multicohort studies are needed to unequivocally differentiate aging from disease progression.
