epilepsy

Attention deficits in brain injury have been thought of as a loss of the resources needed to concentrate on a task. However, this study shows that temporal alignment of responses in different brain areas is also a very important mechanism that contributes to attention and could be impaired by brain injury.

The tiny conduits carrying those electrical signals are sodium channels that are vital to our well-being—they trigger action potentials, or spurts of electrical energy that course from body to brain to deliver messages that invoke feelings like pain or temperature sensitivity. When such channels go awry, they contribute to a slew of diseases, one of which is epilepsy.

The researchers have demonstrated for the first time that the loss of white matter fibres between brain regions is a highly selective process – a phenomenon they call preferential detachment. They show that connections between distant brain regions, between brain hemispheres, and between processing modules lose fewer nerve fibres during brain maturation than expected. The researchers say this may explain how we retain a stable brain network during brain maturation.

Physicians at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) have been investigating if established anti-epilepsy drugs have anti-inflammatory or pro-inflammatory properties – an effect for which these pharmaceutical agents are not usually tested. One of the substances tested caused stronger inflammations, while another one inhibited them. As inflammatory reactions in the brain may be the underlying cause for epileptic disorders, it is vital to take the trigger for the disorder under consideration when selecting drugs for treatment, as the researchers concluded.

More testing is likely to reveal more such patients and, he said, may allow development of a new drug to make life better for patients with variant NKH.

The majority of epilepsy patients who have brain surgery to treat their disorder are satisfied with the results in reducing epilepsy-related seizures and improving their psychological and social well-being.

An international patient trial suggests that the safest way of managing arteriovenous malformations (AVM) of the brain is to treat the patient’s symptoms only, and not the AVM.

In what are believed to be the first studies of their kind, Cedars-Sinai researchers recording the real-time firing of individual nerve cells in the brain found that a specific type of neuron in a structure called the amygdala performed differently in people who suffer from autism spectrum disorder than in those who do not.

The team found that the drug bumetanide, a known NKCC1 inhibitor, blocked this process and prevented the cells from overloading with chloride. By knocking down this “secondary” cellular effect of ammonia, the researchers were able to control the seizures in the mice and prolong their survival.

These findings have implications not only for families affected with Warburg Micro syndrome, but also provide novel information about the genes and molecular pathways essential for human development that is relevant for more common developmental disorders such as epilepsy and autism.