Study investigates plasticity of motor representations in patients with brain tumors

Winner of the Brainlab Community Neurosurgery Award, Sandro Krieg, MD, presented his research, Plasticity of Motor Representations in Patients with Brain Lesions: a Navigated TMS Study, during the 2017 American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) Annual Scientific Meeting.

This study investigated the spatial distributions of motor representations in terms of tumor-induced brain plasticity by analyzing navigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (nTMS) motor maps derived from 100 patients with motor eloquently located brain tumors in or adjacent to the precentral gyrus (PrG).

The research evoked 8,774 motor potentials (MEPs) that were elicited in six muscles of the upper and lower extremity by stimulating four gyri in patients with five possible tumor locations. Regarding the MEP frequency of each muscle-gyrus subdivision per patient, the expected frequency was 3.53 (8,774 divided by 100 patients, further divided by six muscles and four gyri). Accordingly, the patient ratio for each subdivision was calculated by defining the per-patient minimum data points as three.

The tumor-location specific patient ratios were higher for frontal tumors in both gyri than for other tumor locations. This suggests that the finger representation reorganization in these frontal gyri, which corresponds to location of dorsal premotor areas, might be due to within-premotor reorganization rather than relocation of motor function from PrG into premotor areas one might expect from the Rolandic tumors. The research indicates that reorganization of the finger motor representations might be limited along the middle-to-dorsal dimension of the dorsal premotor areas (posterior MFG and SFG) and might not cross rostrally from the primary motor cortex (PrG) to the dorsal premotor cortex.

Source: http://www.aans.org/