Ipsilateral thalamic seizure-onset recruitment did not change with age in 19 patients aged 1.9–28.1 years

We tested whether ipsilateral thalamic recruitment in the first 20 s of seizures changed with patient age, and whether an age relation was specific to the thalamus. We analyzed pair-level line-length recruitment indices for 53 seizures in 19 patients (ages 1.9–28.1 years; 6 younger than 12) from OpenNeuro ds007445, snapshot 1.0.4. Values were taken unchanged from an earlier internal contribution. In the pre-registered primary test, age was not correlated with patient-level thalamic recruitment (Spearman rho = 0.08, two-sided permutation p = 0.74; 95% bootstrap CI, −0.42 to 0.58; n = 19). Age was also not correlated with the thalamus-minus-ipsilateral-white-matter index (rho = 0.17, p = 0.51; n = 17). The 1–80 Hz sensitivity feature gave the same result. Exploratory tests found a larger mean thalamic index in patients with any FBTCS seizure than in those without (0.42 vs 0.21; p = 0.14; 5 vs 14 patients), and no significant association with mean “Diffuse” grade (rho = 0.25, p = 0.30). The sample is small: bootstrap intervals include moderate correlations in both directions, and the data exclude only strong age effects (|rho| greater than approximately 0.6). The fixed-window index does not measure recruitment latency. Contact positions were not checked, and age, sampling rate, seizure focus, and thalamic coverage are not independent in this sample. The FBTCS flag covers all seizures in the source metadata, not only the three analyzed sessions. The complete methods, results, limitations, deviations, input hashes, code, and reproduction steps are included in the package.

intracranial EEG · thalamus · seizure · epilepsy · age · line length · recruitment · OpenNeuro · permutation test