Although the remission of self-limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (SeLECTS) usually occurs by adolescence, deficits in cognition and behavior are not uncommon. Several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have revealed connectivity disturbances in patients with SeLECTS associated with cognitive impairment. However, the disadvantages of fMRI are expensive, time-consuming, and motion sensitive. In the current study, we used a partial directed coherence (PDC) method to analyze electroencephalogram (EEG) for exploring brain connectivity in patients with SeLECTS. This study enrolled 38 participants (19 patients with SeLECTS and 19 healthy controls) for PDC analysis. Our results demonstrated that the controls had significantly higher PDC inflow connectivity in the F7, T3, FP1, and F8 channels than patients with SeLECTS. By contrast, the patients with SeLECTS demonstrated significantly higher PDC inflow connectivity than did the controls in the T5, Pz, and P4 channels. We also compared the PDC connectivity in different Brodmann areas between the patients with SeLECTS and the controls. The results revealed that the inflow connectivity in the BA9_46_L area was significantly higher in the controls than in the patients with SeLECTS, whereas the inflow connectivity in the MIF_L area 4 was significantly higher in the patients with SeLECTS than in the controls. Our proposed approach of combining EEG with PDC provides a convenient and useful tool for investigating functional connectivity in patients with SeLECTS. This approach is time-saving and inexpensive compared with fMRI, but it achieves similar results to fMRI.
Keywords: EEG; cognition; fMRI; partial directed coherence; self-limited epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes.