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Amygdala lesions are associated with improved mood after epilepsy surgery
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Amygdala lesions are associated with improved mood after epilepsy surgery

Fatimah M Albazron, Nicholas T Trapp, Daniel Tranel, Matthew A Howard III and Aaron D Boes
Brain structure and function, Vol.228(3-4), pp.1033-1038
05/2023
DOI: 10.1007/s00429-023-02621-2
PMCID: PMC10637769
PMID: 36826513
url
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10637769/pdf/nihms-1940010.pdfView
Open Access

Abstract

Neuroimaging studies in healthy and clinical populations strongly associate the amygdala with emotion, especially negative emotions. The consequences of surgical resection of the amygdala on mood are not well characterized. We tested the hypothesis that amygdala resection would result in mood improvement. In this study, we evaluated a cohort of 52 individuals with medial temporal lobectomy for intractable epilepsy who had resections variably involving the amygdala. All individuals achieved good post-surgical seizure control and had pre- and post-surgery mood assessment with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) ratings. We manually segmented the surgical resection cavities and performed multivariate lesion-symptom mapping of change in BDI. Our results showed a significant improvement in average mood ratings from pre- to post-surgery across all patients. In partial support of our hypothesis, resection of the right amygdala was significantly associated with mood improvement (r = 0.5, p = 0.008). The lesion-symptom map also showed that resection of the right hippocampus and para-hippocampal gyrus was associated with worsened post-surgical mood. Future studies could evaluate this finding prospectively in larger samples while including other neuropsychological outcome measures.
Amygdala Lesion symptom mapping Mood changes Temporal lobe epilepsy

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