Understanding neural network behavior is essential to shed light on epileptogenesis and seizure propagation. The interconnectivity and plasticity of mammalian limbic and neocortical brain regions provide the substrate for the hypersynchrony and hyperexcitability associated with seizure activity. Recurrent unprovoked seizures are the hallmark of epilepsy, and limbic epilepsy is the most common t...

OBJECTIVE To explore the factors associated with preoperative epileptic seizure and surgical outcome in patients with cerebral gangliolioma (GG). METHODS A total of 31 consecutive patients with pathologically confirmed ganglioglioma and surgically treated from January 2003 to June 2011 in West China Hospital of Sichuan University were retrospectively reviewed. Clinical data, surgical procedur...

Medically intractable epilepsy is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. For those with focal epilepsy and correlated electrophysiological or radiographic features, open surgical resection can achieve high rates of seizure control, but can be associated with neurologic deficits and cognitive effects. Recent innovations have allowed for more minimally invasive methods of surgical sei...

Focal epilepsy is commonly pharmacoresistant, and resective surgery is often contraindicated by proximity to eloquent cortex. Many patients have no effective treatment options. Gene therapy allows cell-type specific inhibition of neuronal excitability, but on-demand seizure suppression has only been achieved with optogenetics, which requires invasive light delivery. Here we test a combined chem...

We describe a female insulinoma patient who presented with recurrent attacks of abnormal behavior, confusion, and seizure. Her interictal EEG showed epileptiform discharges on the left temporal area, therefore she was initially misdiagnosed as temporal lobe epilepsy. In the video-EEG monitoring, hypoglycemic state was detected during the seizure attack, so the right diagnosis was made after the...

Sixty-five children with seizure disorders, who had been treated with multiple anticonvulsants but were poorly controlled, were selected from the Montreal Children's Hospital Convulsive Disorder Clinic and Neurology Service and were treated with sodium valproate (valproate). All types of seizure disorders were included in the group. Rapid oral absorption of the drug lead to peak plasma levels i...

− Twelve patients suffering from intractable epilepsy and presenting with radiological evidence of diffuse hemispheric involvement of a dysplastic process, were treated by disconnective hemispherectomy, either functional hemispherectomy or peri-insular hemispherotomy. The median age at surgery was 4.5 years old and the interval between seizure onset and surgery, 3 years. All patients underwent ...

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUPEP) is the commonest cause of seizure-related mortality in people with intractable epilepsy. The incidence of SUDEP varies in different epilepsy populations, with lower rates in population-based studies, higher in referral populations and clinical trials of adjunct drugs for complex partial epilepsy, and highest rates for surgical series. Certain risk fac...

Vagus nerve stimulation versus ''best drug therapy'' in epilepsy patients who have failed best drug therapy I would like to thank Dr. Hoppe and colleagues for their recent study published in Seizure examining vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) versus ''best drug therapy'' in medically refractory epilepsy patients. 1 However, I have concerns regarding the authors' methodology and conclusions. In this...

Bang sensitive (BS) Drosophila mutants display characteristic seizure-like phenotypes resembling, in some aspects, those of human seizure disorders such as epilepsy. The BS mutant parabss1, caused by a gain-of-function mutation of the voltage-gated Na+ channel gene, is extremely seizure-sensitive with phenotypes that have proven difficult to ameliorate by anti-epileptic drug feeding or by seizu...