Recognition and perception of emotions in juvenile myoclonic epilepsy

Abstract

ObjectivePerception and recognition of emotions are fundamental prerequisites of human life. Patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) may have emotional and behavioral impairments which might influence socially desirable interactions. We aimed to investigate perception and recognition of emotions in patients with JME by means of neuropsychological tests and functional MRI (fMRI).MethodsSixty‐five patients with JME (median age 27 years, IQR 23–34) were prospectively recruited at the Department of Neurology, Christian Doppler University Hospital, Paracelsus Medical University, Salzburg, Austria. Patients were compared to 68 healthy controls (median age 24 years, IQR 21–31), matched for sex, age and education. All study participants underwent the Networks of Emotion Processing test battery (NEmo), an fMRI paradigm of “dynamic fearful faces”, structured interview for psychiatric and personality disorders and comprehensive neuropsychological testing.ResultsJME patients versus healthy controls, demonstrated significant deficits in emotion recognition in facial and verbal tasks of all emotions, especially fear. fMRI revealed decreased amygdala activation in JME patients as compared to healthy controls. Patients were at a higher risk of experiencing psychiatric disorders as compared to healthy controls. Cognitive evaluation revealed impaired attentional and executive functioning, namely psychomotor speed, tonic alertness, divided attention, mental flexibility, and inhibition of automated reactions. Duration of epilepsy correlated negatively with parallel prosodic and facial emotion recognition in NEmo. Deficits in emotion recognition were not associated with psychiatric comorbidities, impaired attention and executive functions, types of seizures and treatment.SignificanceThis prospective study demonstrated that as compared to healthy subjects, patients with JME had significant deficits in recognition and perception of emotions as shown by neuropsychological tests and fMRI. The results of this study may have importance for psychological/psychotherapeutical interventions in the management of patients with JME.

Impaired orienting function detected through eye movements in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

“…Attention has been implicated as a foundation of cognitive function and can be divided into three distinct subnetworks: alerting, orienting, and executive network (Posner and Petersen, 1990;Petersen and Posner, 2012). A decline in attention has been observed in patients with epilepsy (Englot et al, 2020;Rainer et al, 2023). The literature on this topic reports that patients with temporal lobe epilepsy experience alerting and executive network impairment, which is associated with reduced white matter fibers and disrupted brain networks between temporal and frontal lobes (Cataldi et al, 2013;Tyler et al, 2015;Englot et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2021).…”