The "disinhibition" hypothesis contends that (1) seizures begin when granule cells in the dentate gyrus of the dorsal hippocampus are disinhibited and (2) disinhibition occurs because GABAergic interneurons are excessively inhibited by other GABAergic interneurons. We tested the disinhibition hypothesis using the experimental model that inspired it-naturally epileptic Mongolian gerbils. To dete...

Synchronization of local and distributed neuronal assemblies is thought to underlie fundamental brain processes such as perception, learning, and cognition. In neurological disease, neuronal synchrony can be altered and in epilepsy may play an important role in the generation of seizures. Linear cross-correlation and mean phase coherence of local field potentials (LFPs) are commonly used measur...

Epileptic seizure prediction is a difficult problem in clinical applications, and it has the potential to significantly improve the patients' daily lives whose seizures cannot be controlled by either drugs or surgery. However, most current studies of epileptic seizure prediction focus on high sensitivity and low false-positive rate only and lack the flexibility for a variety of epileptic seizur...

BACKGROUND Investigation of the functioning of the brain in living systems has been a major effort amongst scientists and medical practitioners. Amongst the various disorder of the brain, epilepsy has drawn the most attention because this disorder can affect the quality of life of a person. In this paper we have reinvestigated the EEGs for normal and epileptic patients using surrogate analysis,...

OBJECTIVE Our purpose was to present and discuss the psychiatric diagnoses of patients who presented psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) during video-electroencephalographic monitoring (VEEG). METHODS Out of 98 patients, a total of 28 patients presented PNES during the diagnostic procedure. In those cases in which the PNES that occurred during VEEG were validated by clinical history (cl...

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is the record of the brain electrical activity and it contains valuable information related to the different physiological and pathological states of the brain. Epilepsy is known to be the most prevalent neurological disorder in humans and seizure discharge is the main characteristics of the epilepsy. EEG is an important clinical tool for the diagnosis and monitoring ...

PURPOSE Research into epileptic networks has recently allowed deeper insights into the epileptic process. Here we investigated the importance of individual network nodes for seizure dynamics. METHODS We analysed intracranial electroencephalographic recordings of 86 focal seizures with different anatomical onset locations. With time-resolved correlation analyses, we derived a sequence of weigh...

Intractable epilepsy is commonly believed to be the main cause of uncontrolled seizures and hospitalization in epileptic patients. We study frequency and types of potential provocative factors in epileptic patients admitted with seizures, and suggest methods to decrease seizure occurrence and hospitalization. Over 6 months we prospectively studied all epileptic patients hospitalized for seizure...

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy is the most common, intractable seizure disorder in adults. It is associated with an asymmetric pattern of hippocampal neuron loss within the endfolium (hilus and CA3) and CA1, with limited pathology in extra-hippocampal regions. We previously developed a model of focally-evoked seizure-induced neuronal death using intra-amygdala kainic acid (KA) microinjection and...

During the past century, most neuroscientists have believed that epileptic seizures began abruptly in a matter of a few seconds before clinical onset. Since the late 80’s, there has been an explosion of interests in neuroscience research to predict epileptic seizures based on quantitative analyses of brain electrical activity captured by electroencephalograms (EEGs). Many research groups have d...