Commentary Animal models of epilepsy have helped to promote investigations of underlying mechanisms of epileptogenesis and to facilitate the development and screening of novel treatments. A large number and variety of animal models have been created, the equally numerous types and causes of epilepsy in people. Of course, in vivo models of epilepsy, in which animals exhibit actual behavioral and...

Extracellular ion concentrations change as a function of neuronal activity and also represent important factors influencing the dynamic state of a population of neurons. In particular, relatively small changes in extracellular potassium concentration ( K+ o) mediate substantial changes in neuronal excitability and intrinsic firing patterns. While experimental approaches are limited in their abi...

Commentary One of the biggest fears that immediately arises in people presenting with their first seizure is the worry that they have a brain tumor. While fortunately the majority of patients with epilepsy do not have brain tumors, about 4% of all patients with epilepsy have seizures caused by brain tumors. Conversely , approximately 30% of patients with brain tumors have epilepsy (1). The risk...

Recent work has suggested a link between h channels and epilepsy. In this issue of Neuron, Shah et al. demonstrate that a robust, postseizure decrease in h channels during a critical phase of epileptogenesis mechanistically underlies dendritic hyperexcitability in entorhinal-hippocampal pyramidal cells.

The dentate gyrus, a major entry point to the hippocampus, gates (or filters) incoming information from the cortex. During sleep or anesthesia, the slow-wave oscillation (SWO) orchestrates hippocampus-neocortex communication, which is important for memory formation. The dentate gate is altered in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) early during epileptogenesis, which favors the propagation of patholog...

Norepinephrine serves as a neurotransmitter for a population of neurons the cell bodies of which reside in a brainstem nucleus and the axons of which project widely to discrete subsets of forebrain neurons. Norepinephrine powerfully inhibits epileptogenesis in the kindling model. Pharmacological methods have demonstrated that the antiepileptogenic actions of norepinephrine are exerted via alpha...

Syntaxin, a protein required for the docking of synaptic vesicles, may be involved in the manifestation of synaptic plasticity. The possible involvement of syntaxin in epileptogenesis was investigated by assessing the expression levels of syntaxin1B/GR33 mRNA by in situ hybridization at different stages of hippocampal kindling epileptogenesis and after the induction of generalized seizures. Den...

Voltage-gated sodium channels (VGSCs) play a vital role in controlling neuronal excitability. Nav1.6 is the most abundantly expressed VGSCs subtype in the adult central nervous system and has been found to contribute to facilitate the hyperexcitability of neurons after electrical induction of status epilepticus (SE). To clarify the exact expression patterns of Nav1.6 during epileptogenesis, we ...

Epilepsy clinically has an inhibitory impact on cognitive function, but whether it is associated with epileptogenesis is unclear. Since the epileptic spike characterizes temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), the present study was aimed to analyze the transient effects of sporadic spikes (SSs) on theta rhythm during epileptogenesis. The local field potentials (LFPs) were recorded in CA1 area in four rat...

Identification of cell signaling mechanisms mediating seizure-related neuronal death and epileptogenesis is important for developing more effective therapies for epilepsy. The mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway has recently been implicated in regulating neuronal death and epileptogenesis in rodent models of epilepsy. In particular, kainate-induced status epilepticus causes abnormal ac...