Sarcopenia and anti-seizure medication response in juvenile myoclonic epilepsy

This study aimed to investigate the presence of sarcopenia in patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) and the association between sarcopenia and response to anti-seizure medication (ASM) in patients with JME.

We enrolled 42 patients with JME and 42 healthy controls who underwent brain magnetic resonance imaging with three-dimensional T1-weighted imaging. We measured the temporal muscle thickness (TMT), a radiographic marker for sarcopenia, using T1-weighted imaging. We compared the TMT between patients with JME and healthy controls and analyzed it according to the ASM response in patients with JME. We also performed a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis to evaluate how well the TMT differentiated the groups.

The TMT in patients with JME did not differ from that in healthy controls (9.630 vs. 9.956 mm, p = .306); however, ASM poor responders had a lower TMT than ASM good responders (9.109 vs. 10.104 mm, p = .023). ROC curve analysis revealed that the TMT exhibited a poor performance in differentiating patients with JME from healthy controls, with an area under the ROC curve of .570 (p = .270), but good performance in differentiating between ASM good and poor responders, with an area under the ROC curve of .700 (p = .015).

The TMT did not differ between patients with JME and healthy controls; however, it was reduced in ASM poor responders compared to ASM good responders, suggesting a link between ASM response and sarcopenia in patients with JME. TMT can be used to investigate sarcopenia in various neurological disorders.