Accurately characterising the brain networks involved in seizure activity may have important implications for our understanding of epilepsy. Intracranial EEG-fMRI can be used to capture focal epileptic events in humans with exquisite electrophysiological sensitivity and allows for identification of brain structures involved in this phenomenon over the entire brain. We investigated ictal BOLD ne...

Ictal pleasant feelings are a rare sign of focal epilepsies. The most popular description was performed by Dostojevskij, who reported an aura by Myshken in one of his books. No convincing evidence has been published concerning the cerebral localization of ictal happiness. In this study, the findings of 11 patients with ictal pleasant feelings are described. In eight patients, the origin of the ...

Continuous application of 4-aminopyridine (4-AP, 50 microM) to combined slices of hippocampus-entorhinal cortex obtained from adult mice induces (1) interictal discharges that initiate in the CA3 area and propagate via the hippocampal regions CA1 and subiculum to the entorhinal cortex and return to the hippocampus through the dentate gyrus; and (2) ictal discharges that originate in the entorhi...

Dendritic mechanisms have been implied to play a key role in the formation of epileptic discharges. However, presently only a handful of direct dendritic recordings have been reported during epileptic discharges. In this study, I performed simultaneous voltage recordings from the soma and apical dendrite of the same neuron combined with calcium-imaging measurements to investigate inter-ictal- a...

Ictal bradycardia, which is considered to be one of the causes of sudden unexplained death in epilepsy, is rare. A 10-year-old girl with focal cortical dysplasia in her right centroparietal region developed transient ictal bradycardia during cluster seizures. Brain magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated a high signal intensity lesion adjacent to the focal cortical dysplasia lesion. Ictal 99mTc...

Epileptic events initiate a large focal increase in metabolism and cerebral blood flow (CBF) to the ictal focus. In contrast, decreases in CBF have been demonstrated surrounding the focus, the etiology of which is unknown (i.e., arising either from active shunting of blood or passive steal). The relationship between these events and neuronal activity and metabolism are also unknown. We investig...

PURPOSE Nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy (NFLE) is characterized by sleep-related paroxysmal motor attacks occurring almost exclusively during non-REM sleep. Surgical treatment may relieve symptoms in drug-resistant patients. However, the identification of the epileptogenic zone, the region to be resected, is frequently challenging because of the absence of lateralizing and localizing informatio...

INTRODUCTION There is limited information on ictal unilateral eye blinking (UEB) as a lateralizing sign in focal seizures. We identified two patients with UEB and propose a novel mechanism of UEB based on a review of the literature. MATERIALS AND METHODS We report on two patients with intractable focal epilepsy showing UEB among 269 consecutive patients undergoing noninvasive video-EEG monito...