Disconnection syndrome is a neurological disorder caused by interruption or functional separation of information transmission between different cortical or subcortical brain regions[^1]. Classically, this involves the connection between the two cerebral hemispheres, particularly via the Corpus callosum. The syndrome is characterized less by primary deficits of individual brain regions than by the loss of integrated processing across distributed neural networks.
Etiology
Disconnection syndromes may have various causes:
Surgical: Corpus callosotomy for drug-resistant epilepsy
Vascular: Infarcts in the territory of the A. cerebri anterior
Traumatic: Diffuse axonal injury
Neoplastic: Tumor infiltration or compression
Inflammatory/degenerative: Multiple sclerosis, Marchiafava–Bignami disease
The deliberate induction of a disconnection syndrome, for example through Corpus callosotomy, is, by contrast, an established neurosurgical procedure for severe epilepsy and illustrates the functional significance of interhemispheric networks.