Resolution of ictal bradycardia and asystole following temporal lobectomy: A case report, and review of available cases using pacemakers.

Ictal bradycardia (IB) and ictal asystole (IA) are uncommonly recognized phenomena that increase morbidity in patients with epilepsy by causing syncope and seizure-related falls. These arrhythmias are also suspected to be involved in the pathophysiology of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). We report a case of a 57-year-old male with left temporal lobe epilepsy who experienced both IB and IA.

Epilepsy in an elderly population: Classification, etiology and drug resistance.

Purpose: To characterize epilepsy in an elderly population and describe the prevalence of drug resistant epilepsy (DRE) using recently validated International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) criteria.

Methods: Using a case-control design, 72 patients aged 60 years and older (cases) and 223 patients under age 60 (controls) were identified from the Saskatchewan Epilepsy Program database. Patients' charts were retrospectively reviewed.

Behavioral alterations in rat offspring following maternal immune activation and ELR-CXC chemokine receptor antagonism during pregnancy: implications for neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders.

Research suggests that maternal immune activation (MIA) during pregnancy increases the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders including schizophrenia and autism in the offspring. Current theories suggest that inflammatory mediators including cytokines and chemokines may underlie the increased risk of these disorders in humans. For example, elevated maternal interleukin-8 (IL-8) during pregnancy is associated with increased risk of schizophrenia in the offspring.

Heightened fear in response to a safety cue and extinguished fear cue in a rat model of maternal immune activation.

Maternal immune activation (MIA) during pregnancy is an environmental risk factor for psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia and autism in the offspring. Hence, changes in an array of behaviors, including behavioral flexibility, consistent with altered functioning of cortico-limbic circuits have been reported in rodent models of MIA. Surprisingly, previous studies have not examined the effect of MIA on the extinction of fear conditioning which depends on cortico-limbic circuits.

Altered object exploration but not temporal order memory retrieval in an object recognition test following treatment of rats with the group II metabotropic glutamate receptor agonist LY379268.

Temporal order memory refers to the ability to distinguish past experiences in the order that they occurred. Temporal order memory for objects is often tested in rodents using spontaneous object recognition paradigms. The circuitry mediating memory in these tests is distributed and involves ionotropic glutamate receptors in the perirhinal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex.