Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) usually had an initial precipitating injury in early childhood. However, epilepsy does not develop in all children who have undergone an early insult. As in patients, the consequences of the lithium-pilocarpine-induced status epilepticus (SE) are age dependent, and only a subset of 21-day-old rats will develop epilepsy. Thus with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we explored the differences in the evolution of lesions in these two populations of rats.