Seizure Prediction Could Change Treatment Of Epilepsy
Researchers at the University of Florida and the Malcom Randall Veterans Affairs Medical Center have been granted a U.S. patent for a seizure-prediction technique that one day may change the course of epilepsy treatment.
With a new five-year, $4.4 million National Institutes of Health grant, the research team is continuing efforts to refine the system, which involves analyzing complex electrical activity in the brain to identify patterns that reveal a seizure is developing-minutes to hours before it occurs.
"Basically our idea is to identify a pre-seizure transition phase. At that point, one could inject a drug, or have a drug released, that would 'reset' the brain in order to prevent the seizure from happening," said J. Chris Sackellares, M.D., a VA neurologist and a UF professor of neurology, biomedical engineering and neuroscience.
"Our goal would be to enable people with epilepsy to take less medicine than they currently do, and to be able to use it only when it's necessary, rather than having it constantly in their systems," said Sackellares, who is affiliated with the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute of UF. "Down the road, we also may explore giving the brain a small electrical stimulus to prevent seizures when they are beginning to form."
UF is negotiating with companies interested in licensing the technology to develop commercial applications. Such products could include implantable devices that can detect signs a seizure is approaching and then deliver medication or other type of stimulus to prevent it.
The Epilepsy Foundation of America estimates that 2.3 million people in the United States suffer from seizure disorders, which are grouped under the common name of epilepsy. In 70 percent of the cases, there is no known cause; genetic disorders, birth defects, head trauma, tumors, strokes, infections and poisons are implicated in the others. Treatment typically consists of medicines, but the drugs can cause side effects and often do not offer complete prevention of seizures.
Sackellares and Leonidas D. Iasemidis, Ph.D., a former VA research engineer and UF faculty member, began to suspect in 1988 that "chaos" science would be able to shed light on epilepsy. Chaos theory suggests that through sophisticated mathematical analysis, patterns sometimes can be observed in events that previously had appeared to be random.
Early in the 1990s, Sackellares and Iasemidis, who is now at Arizona State University, became the first to identify the existence of a pre-seizure transition period. In the past several years, they have begun to develop methods to detect the transition anywhere from minutes to many hours ahead of time. They accomplish this through computer analysis of the brain's complex electrical signals, which can be recorded by electroencephalograms, or EEGs.
With the new grant, a multidisciplinary team of researchers, including scientists at Arizona State, will seek to improve the accuracy of the seizure-prediction technique, in part by analyzing additional measures of electrical activity in the brain and determining which sites to monitor with electrodes to yield the most significant information about the potential for seizures. They are conducting the research by analyzing brain electrical activity in people and in mice.
"We need to look at the complex patterns involved in the transition to the pre-seizure state. Like turbulence in the air, this occurs in a very complex way, not always in the same place, and not the same size or length of time, so it's not easy to identify," Sackellares said. "We're trying to develop more sophisticated time-series analysis techniques to account for this."
In addition to Sackellares, other key UF players in the research effort are Jose Principe, Ph.D., John Harris, Ph.D., and Panos Pardalos, Ph.D., from the College of Engineering; Paul Carney, M.D., Steven Roper, M.D., Johannes van Oostrom, Ph.D., and Richard Melker, M.D., from the College of Medicine; and Mark Yang, Ph.D., from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. - By Victoria White Related website:
[Contact: Victoria White]
30-Nov-2001 |
