IEEE Trans Neural Syst Rehabil Eng
October 2021
Management of drug resistant focal epilepsy would be greatly assisted by a reliable warning system capable of alerting patients prior to seizures to allow the patient to adjust activities or medication. Such a system requires successful identification of a preictal, or seizure-prone state. Identification of preictal states in continuous long- duration intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings of dogs with naturally occurring epilepsy was investigated using a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe establishment of memories involves reactivation of waking neuronal activity patterns and strengthening of associated neural circuits during slow-wave sleep (SWS), a process known as "cellular consolidation" (Dudai and Morris, 2013). Reactivation of neural activity patterns during waking behaviors that occurs on a timescale of seconds to minutes is thought to constitute memory recall (O'Keefe and Nadel, 1978), whereas consolidation of memory traces may be revealed and served by correlated firing (reactivation) that appears during sleep under conditions suitable for synaptic modification (Buhry et al., 2011).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHigh frequency oscillations are associated with normal brain function, but also increasingly recognized as potential biomarkers of the epileptogenic brain. Their role in human cognition has been predominantly studied in classical gamma frequencies (30-100 Hz), which reflect neuronal network coordination involved in attention, learning and memory. Invasive brain recordings in animals and humans demonstrate that physiological oscillations extend beyond the gamma frequency range, but their function in human cognitive processing has not been fully elucidated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlmost all previous studies of familial risk of epilepsy have had potentially serious methodological limitations. Our goal was to address these limitations and provide more rigorous estimates of familial risk in a population-based study. We used the unique resources of the Rochester Epidemiology Project to identify all 660 Rochester, Minnesota residents born in 1920 or later with incidence of epilepsy from 1935-94 (probands) and their 2439 first-degree relatives who resided in Olmsted County.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSeizure forecasting has the potential to create new therapeutic strategies for epilepsy, such as providing patient warnings and delivering preemptive therapy. Progress on seizure forecasting, however, has been hindered by lack of sufficient data to rigorously evaluate the hypothesis that seizures are preceded by physiological changes, and are not simply random events. We investigated seizure forecasting in three dogs with naturally occurring focal epilepsy implanted with a device recording continuous intracranial EEG (iEEG).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: To validate a brief screening instrument for identifying people with epilepsy in epidemiologic or genetic studies.
Methods: We designed a nine-question screening instrument for epilepsy and administered it by telephone to individuals with medical record-documented epilepsy (lifetime history of >or=2 unprovoked seizures, n = 168) or isolated unprovoked seizure (n = 54), and individuals who were seizure-free on medical record review (n = 120), from a population-based study using Rochester Epidemiology Project resources. Interviewers were blinded to record-review findings.