In Vivo Studies Of The Epileptic Hippocampus
Epilepsy is among the most serious neurological disorders. Current treatments fail to control seizures in 40% of patients with epilepsy, and there is no treatment that prevents epilepsy. We propose to continue our multidisciplinary electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies of patients and rat models of mesial temporal lobe epilepsy and posttraumatic epilepsy, in order to identify biomarkers and targets for novel approaches to seizure control, disease prevention, and cure.
The Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study For Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EPIBIOSS4RX)
Despite decades of research that have led to an understanding of many causes of epilepsy and yielded over fifteen new antiseizure drugs and novel non-drug therapies, there remain no treatments that prevent epilepsy, nor are there ways to identify and prove such treatments. A major obstacle to research in this area is the fact that studies from single institutions are inadequate to answer the most important questions. The Epilepsy Bioinformatics Study for Antiepileptogenic Therapy (EpiBioS4Rx) is a for a large, international, multicenter Center without Walls (CWOW) to address this pressing need by using studies of animals and patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI) leading to post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE), to develop the techniques and patient populations necessary to carry out future cost effective full-scale clinical trials of epilepsy prevention therapies.
New Electrographic Biomarkers Of Epileptogenesis
The goal of this study is to identify and characterize pathological networks that develop after brain lesions, during the process of epileptogenesis using electrophysiological and magnetic resonance imaging approaches. This work will allow the identification of mechanisms causing post-traumatic and temporal lobe epilepsy. We anticipate that results obtained in this study will lead to the discovery of new approaches for the prevention of epilepsy.
Defining The Epileptogenic Network And Identifying Which Components Generate Seizures
Temporal lobe epilepsy is the most common drug-resistant focal epilepsy and resective surgery can reduce or eliminate seizures in many patients, but it does not help all patients with this seizure disorder. Failure to obtain seizure relief often occurs in patients who require invasive EEG tests because the brain area responsible for generating seizures is uncertain. This research should produce important information to understand the structural and functional mechanisms supporting the generation and spread of seizures in difficult cases of suspected temporal lobe epilepsy, and ultimately this will help improve diagnosis, develop better surgical and non-surgical treatments, and increase the likelihood for seizure freedom.
