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Size of the Corpus Callosum in Cerebral Palsy
Author(s) -
Sheth Raj D.,
Schaefer G. Bradley,
Keller Gina M.,
Hobbs Gerald R.,
Ortiz Orlando,
Bodensteiner John B.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of neuroimaging
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1552-6569
pISSN - 1051-2284
DOI - 10.1111/jon199663180
Subject(s) - corpus callosum , medicine , cerebral palsy , dysgenesis , magnetic resonance imaging , encephalopathy , pathology , radiology , anatomy , physical therapy
It has been suggested that the size of the corpus callosum may have diagnostic significance in cerebral palsy, although this relationship is incompletely defined. Ninety‐one patients with cerebral palsy had been studied by magnetic resonance imaging in the 5‐year period from 1990 to 1994. Fifty‐seven of these 91 patients had a technically appropriate midsagittal magnetic resonance image for quantitative morphometric analysis. The ratio of the area of the corpus callosum to the area of the supratentorial brain was compared to published age‐ and gender‐specific norms. Imaging findings were correlated with clinical history and cause of cerebral palsy. The corpus callosum was of normal size in 43 patients and more than 2 standard deviations below the mean in 14 patients. The causes for cerebral palsy included hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy (32), cerebral dysgenesis (8), and porencephalic strokes (6); the etiology could not be established in 11 patients. The size of the corpus callosum was highly correlated with the cause of cerebral palsy, such that all patients with cerebral dysgenesis had hypoplasia of the corpus callosum (one‐sided z test, p < 0.0001). Conversely, the callosum was of normal size in 32 of 38 patients with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy and porencephalic strokes. The presence of a hypoplastic corpus callosum is highly associated with cerebral dysgenesis as a cause for cerebral palsy.