Cerebellocerebral Diaschisis and Postsurgical Posterior Fossa Syndrome in Pediatric Patients

Motor control of handwriting in the developing brain: A review

“…Indeed, in an experiment where participants had to write letters at different sizes, the left parietal cortex was found to code for scale-invariant representations, meaning that the pattern of activation varied as a function of the letter written, but remained similar for a given letter despite changes in size and therefore of muscular motor commands (Kadmon Harpaz et al, 2014). Interestingly, subcortical lesions (Ohno, Bando, Nagura, Ishii, & Yamanouchi, 2000;Vandenborre, van Dun, Engelborghs, & Mariën, 2015), and lesions of the right cerebellum (Mariën, De Smet, Paquier, & Verhoeven, 2010) have also been reported to cause apraxic agraphia. Writing impairments possibly occur through a reorganization of subcortico-cortical or cortico-cerebellar loops exerting a remote effect on premotor and parietal regions after the appearance of the lesion (Mariën et al, 2010;Ohno et al, 2000).…”

“…Interestingly, subcortical lesions (Ohno, Bando, Nagura, Ishii, & Yamanouchi, 2000;Vandenborre, van Dun, Engelborghs, & Mariën, 2015), and lesions of the right cerebellum (Mariën, De Smet, Paquier, & Verhoeven, 2010) have also been reported to cause apraxic agraphia. Writing impairments possibly occur through a reorganization of subcortico-cortical or cortico-cerebellar loops exerting a remote effect on premotor and parietal regions after the appearance of the lesion (Mariën et al, 2010;Ohno et al, 2000). Neuroimaging studies also demonstrated of a very consistent involvement of the right posterior cerebellar hemisphere in studies where the control tasks are otherwise well matched in terms of their motor complexity (Planton et al, 2013).…”

Long-term supratentorial brain structure and cognitive function following cerebellar tumour resections in childhood

“…In light of this growing evidence for non-motor cerebello- cerebral networks, it has been suggested that cognitive deficits following cerebellar lesions are related to disruptions in cerebellocerebral connectivity (Mariën et al, 2010;Miller et al, 2010). For instance, acute cerebello-cerebral diaschisis -i.e.…”

Patients with focal cerebellar lesions show reduced auditory cortex activation during silent reading

“…A priori, one might expect the cerebellar pathology to produce either hypo- or hyperactivations relative to controls; respectively suggesting either a failure to recruit cerebral network nodes (Baillieux et al, 2010; Mariën, De Smet, Paquier, & Verhoeven, 2010) or compensatory reorganization of function (Hattori et al, 2009; Nudo, 2013; Thiel et al, 2001). Importantly, we hypothesized that the spatial overlap between the cerebellar pathology in the patients and activation patterns in our previous fMRI study would predict the specific experimental conditions revealing significant group differences in cortical activation.…”