cortical processing of swallowing in als patients with progressive dysphagia – a magnetoencephalographic study皮质处理吞咽的als患者进行性吞咽困难u2014u2014magnetoencephalographic研究.pdf

Cortical Processing of Swallowing in ALS Patients with Progressive Dysphagia – A Magnetoencephalographic Study 1,2 1 1,2 ¨ 2 2 Inga K. Teismann *, Tobias Warnecke , Sonja Suntrup , Olaf Steinstrater , Linda Kronenberg , 1 3 3 2 1 E. Bernd Ringelstein , Reinhard Dengler , Susanne Petri , Christo Pantev , Rainer Dziewas 1 Department of Neurology, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany, 2 Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis, University of Muenster, Muenster, Germany, 3 Department of Neurology, Hannover Medical School, Hannover, Germany Abstract Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a rare disease causing degeneration of the upper and lower motor neuron. Involvement of the bulbar motor neurons often results in fast progressive dysphagia. While cortical compensation of dysphagia has been previously shown in stroke patients, this topic has not been addressed in patients suffering from ALS. In the present study, we investigated cortical activation during deglutition in two groups of ALS patients with either moderate or severe dysphagia. Whole-head MEG was employed on fourteen patients with sporadic ALS using a self-paced swallowing paradigm. Data were analyzed by means of time-frequency analysis and synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM). Group analysis of individual SAM data was performed using a permutation test. We found a reduction of cortical swallowing related activation in ALS patients compared to healthy controls. Additionally a disease-related shift of hemispheric lateral