epilepsy

Research on Worms Yields Clues on Aging

...akingprogress; in worms. Researchers found that an epilepsy drug used inhumans had the unexpected effect of pr... in St. Louis. When exposed to drugs used to treat epilepsy inhumans, worms lived longer and retained youthful functions longer thannormal.Because the drugs aff...

Gene variations explain drug dose required to control seizures

...g which variants of particular genes patients with epilepsy carry might enable doctors to better predict the d...a partnership, aimed at tailoring the treatment of epilepsy to patients' genetic makeup, between the Department of Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy at the Uni...

UCSD research reveals mechanism involved with type of fatal epilepsy

...ve found that Lafora disease, an inherited form of epilepsy that results in death by the age of 30, can be caused by mutations in a gene that regulates the concentration of the protein laforin. These findings are reported in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Lafora ...

Brain May Be Less Plastic Than Hoped

...e for injuries is well known. Children with severe epilepsy who lose an entire hemisphere during surgery can regain motor control on the affected side of their body and go on to develop normal language skills. But in adults, the case for brain plasticity has been less clear. A series of studies in the 1980s ...

Neurologix announces positive results of gene therapy clinical trial in Parkinson's disease

... gene therapy for treating Parkinson's disease and epilepsy and its core technology, which it refers to as "NLX," is currently being tested in a Company-sponsored Phase I human clinical trial to treat Parkinson's disease. ...

Huntington's cure in flies lays groundwork for broader treatment approaches

...cting research dollars to the continued search for epilepsy genes, Yin believes funding agencies should now consider investing in the search for these "superhighways" of gene convergence. That search might be long and tedious, he adds, but it's most certainly worth a shot. "I think the history of scientific ...

New battery technology helps stimulate nerves

...tical connections in, for example, Parkinson's and epilepsy patients. Designed to be extraordinarily reliable ...nervous system wiring at the heart of Parkinson's, epilepsy and incontinence. "The idea is that whenever you have a broken nerve connection, you can supply the...

You will remember this

...r since the 1960s, are used in hospitals to detect epilepsy in people and are an important tool to show not just what bits of the brain are lighting up but also what triggers it to light up and when. In this test, the important thing was to find out whether brain activity before an event has an impact on me...

Study ties 'new' cell-death mechanism to developmental and degenerative brain disorders

... to eye movement abnormalities, cognitive decline, epilepsy and other significant deficits. Twenty-seven specific locations on human chromosomes have been identified for involvement in the development of ataxias, and 10 causative genes or mutations have been determined. The gene and mutations in this study a...

Mechanism for memory revealed in neurons of electric fish

...erstand memory formation and neural disorders like epilepsy in humans. Dr. Harold Zakon, Dr. Jörg Oestreich and colleagues show that when electric fish zap each other in dark waters, their neurons store a memory of the sizzling communiqué by turning on special cell membrane channels. The channels give the f...

'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

... as well. Now, a patient whose surgery to relieve epilepsy specifically disrupted the VWFA has given researchers, led by Laurent Cohen of the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, an opportunity to demonstrate that the region does indeed play a causal role in the ability to recognize words. The researchers reported in...

Oops! Researchers publish new findings on the brain's response to costly mistakes

...techniques used to study the brains of people with epilepsy or sleep problems, but the electrical signal from the brain is processed in a different way. In prior studies, Gehring and his colleagues observed a distinct brain electrical response to errors, dubbing it ERN for "error-related negativity." Using E...

Molecular mechanism may explain how fevers spark seizures

...'ve also been something of an enigma, he said. The epilepsy research community has struggled to understand how...seizures when she was working as a neurologist and epilepsy specialist in her native China. "I was always impressed by how quickly fevers can trigger convulsi...

Blood flow in brain takes a twist, affecting views of Alzheimer's

...publications fingering astrocytes in diseases like epilepsy and spinal cord injury. "In a disease like Alzheimer's, for instance, perhaps it's the astrocytes themselves that are damaged first," she said. "It may be that for whatever reason, astrocytes are not doing their job properly, and then blood flow dec...

UCLA paper examines how one disease may prevent another

...he ketogenic diet is still used today for cases of epilepsy resistant to medication. During the 1994 winter of starvation when bread supplies to the children's hospital were interrupted at The Hague, young patients with celiac disease, a digestive disease that damages the small intestine and interferes with...

Convergent evolution of molecules in electric fish

...nel proteins can cause serious muscular disorders, epilepsy and heart problems in humans and other vertebrates. But fish have two copies of many of their genes, and Zakon found that the duplicate sodium channel gene could mutate and evolve without harming the fish. "The spare gene gave [the electric fis...

Autistic brain has fewer neurons for processing emotion

...es, the sample excluded brains of individuals with epilepsy or similar disorders associated with cell loss in the amygdala. Paradoxically, past research using magnetic resonance imaging with children has shown that the amygdala in young males with autism is abnormally large in volume due to precocious matu...

Septum keeps neurons in synch, can reduce epileptic seizures by 90 percent

...terest in how the brain works has led him to study epilepsy and Alzheimer's disease. People who suffer Alzheim...ptic rats In this study, the researchers induced epilepsy by injecting anesthetized rats with pilocarpine, a drug that excites the brain's neurons and activat...

'Smart' genetic therapy helps the body to heal itself

...identified a drug ?valproate, used successfully in epilepsy treatment for decades ?that is able to increase SM...tissues such as cultured brain slices derived from epilepsy patients after surgery, as well as motor neuron cultures derived from rat embryos. "The next step w...

Test reveals effectiveness of potential Huntington's disease drugs

...amotrigine, both glutamate inhibitors, are used in epilepsy treatment and as a mood stabilizer, respectively. These three compounds did not significantly protect the cultured cells. However, a drug called memantine, which is used to treat Alzheimer's disease, and riluzole, used in amyotrophic lateral scler...

New neurons could act to alleviate epilepsy

...rons generated as a result of neural damage due to epilepsy show a reduced excitability that could alleviate t...hers said their results suggest that therapies for epilepsy aimed at inducing neurogenesis could prove effective in alleviating the disorder. In an article in ...

New biochip helps study living cells, may speed drug development

...ug development for muscle and nerve disorders like epilepsy and help create more productive crop varieties. ...sorders involving ion channel malfunction, such as epilepsy and chronic pain. About 15 percent of the drugs currently in development affect the activities of io...

Slow brain waves play key role in coordinating complex activity

... electrical activity in the brains of pre-surgical epilepsy patients, the researchers have found the first evi...ology, to record brain activity in brain tumor and epilepsy patients scheduled for surgery to remove a portion of their brains. The epilepsy patients typically ...

A new target for painkillers

...a spaced-out feeling. Anticonvulsant drugs for epilepsy sometime are used to reduce the pain by decreasing nerve cell excitability, but have side effects such as lethargy, fatigue, clouding of mental state and weight gain, McIntosh says. Antidepressants and muscle relaxants have been used, but they can ca...

Gene therapy inhibits epilepsy in animals

...ime, researchers have inhibited the development of epilepsy after a brain insult in animals. By using gene the...rvene after a brain insult to reduce the risk that epilepsy will develop," said one of the lead researchers, Amy R. Brooks-Kayal, M.D., a pediatric neurologist ...

Researchers seek to design first treatment for neuroAIDS

...heory using sodium valproate and lithium, existing epilepsy drugs that turned out to be GSK-3b inhibitors. Gelbard and Maggirwar; along with received in 1999 one of the first grants from the National Institutes of Mental Health designed to convert basic neuroscience into new neuroAIDS drugs. Based on their...

Drug treatment improves learning in mice with Down syndrome symptoms, Stanford/Packard study shows

...950s, PTZ has been primarily used for the study of epilepsy in animals. In 1982 the FDA withdrew approval for the use of PTZ in humans because no clear clinical benefit had been established. That is, until now. "My idea was that it might be possible to harness this excitation effect, which at higher doses ...

MIT: Pulsing light silences overactive neurons

...re neuron activity that occurs in diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson's disease. Such diseases often must...s that are behaving erratically," he said. Many epilepsy patients have implanted electrodes that periodically give their brains an electric jolt, acting as a...

Researchers hot on the trail of brain cell degeneration

...ditions and diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy and stroke. Courtney and his team, based at the A. I. Virtanen Institute of the University of Kuopio, joined forces with Docent Eleanor Coffey's team at the Turku Centre for Biotechnology to carry out the study as part of a series of successful colla...

Rare cell prevents rampant brain activity

...ers like epilepsy. "A characteristic feature of epilepsy is the hyperactivation of cortical pyramid cells, ... what this mechanism inhibits. It is possible that epilepsy is related to a deficit of Martinotti cells or a deficiency of Martinotti activity in the brain." ...

Gene therapy study shows safety and statistically significant improvement in Parkinson's disease

...pment of our other therapeutic programs, including epilepsy where we plan to initiate a Phase 1 gene therapy study this year.” Study Design The study included 12 patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease, with four patients in each of three dose-escalating cohorts. All procedures were performed under...

Millions of children denied drug that costs less than $3 a year

Millions of children with epilepsy in developing countries are being denied an effect...vailable for all. Of the 35 million people with epilepsy who live in developing countries, around 85% receive no treatment at all. As a result, they experien...