A morphological study on vascular changes in the surgically resected tissues of temporal lobe epilepsy-with a special reference to the etiology.

Abstract

(1) Twenty-one out of 23 cases surgically resected specimens of TLE presented the common histological findings; sclerotic changes of the tissues. And the other two cases encountered the small tumors which might be called "cryptic". (2) Since circulatory disturbance is generally accepted to explain the cause of TLE we reexamined vascular behaviors in detail and found the quantitative and qualitative abnormaltities which reached the high rate of 71% (17 out of 21 cases) except two cases of small tumors. Moreover, it is remarkably noteworthy that these vascular changes adjoin the sclerosed parenchymal tissue. (3) It may be said that vascular changes have exerted some influences on the formation of inferomedial temporal sclerosis from the standpoint of the histological findings, though they are alone not fully sufficient to explain the etiology of TLE.