Responsive Neurostimulation of Thalamic and Nonthalamic Targets in Pediatric and Young Adult Patients With Intractable Epilepsy.

Background And Objectives: Epilepsy is a significant cause of morbidity and has negative effects on cognitive and psychosocial development in pediatric and young adult patients. For pediatric patients who have epileptogenic foci that are poorly localized, deep, bilateral, or in eloquent regions and are not candidates for resection, responsive neurostimulation (RNS) may be an option. The study objective was to demonstrate safety and seizure outcomes from RNS in pediatric and young adults with intractable epilepsy with a specific focus on differences between thalamic and nonthalamic RNS lead implantation.

Somatostatin interneuron fate-mapping and structure in a Pten knockout model of epilepsy.

Disruption of inhibitory interneurons is common in the epileptic brain and is hypothesized to play a pivotal role in epileptogenesis. Abrupt disruption and loss of interneurons is well-characterized in status epilepticus models of epilepsy, however, status epilepticus is a relatively rare cause of epilepsy in humans. How interneuron disruption evolves in other forms of epilepsy is less clear.

Transient Seizure Clusters and Epileptiform Activity Following Widespread Bilateral Hippocampal Interneuron Ablation.

Interneuron loss is a prominent feature of temporal lobe epilepsy in both animals and humans and is hypothesized to be critical for epileptogenesis. As loss occurs concurrently with numerous other potentially proepileptogenic changes, however, the impact of interneuron loss in isolation remains unclear. For the present study, we developed an intersectional genetic approach to induce bilateral diphtheria toxin-mediated deletion of Vgat-expressing interneurons from dorsal and ventral hippocampus.

Complex Morphologic Analysis of Cerebral Aneurysms Through the Novel Use of Fractal Dimension as a Predictor of Rupture Status: A Proof of Concept Study.

Background: Aneurysm morphology has been correlated with rupture. Previous reports identified several morphologic indices that predict rupture status, but they measure only specific qualities of the morphology of an aneurysm in a semiquantitative fashion. Fractal analysis is a geometric technique whereby the overall complexity of a shape is quantified through the calculation of a fractal dimension (FD).

Hippocampal interneurons are direct targets for circulating glucocorticoids.

The hippocampus has become a significant target of stress research in recent years because of its role in cognitive functioning, neuropathology, and regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Despite the pervasive impact of stress on psychiatric and neurological disease, many of the circuit- and cell-dependent mechanisms giving rise to the limbic regulation of the stress response remain unknown. Hippocampal excitatory neurons generally express high levels of glucocorticoid receptors (GRs) and are therefore positioned to respond directly to serum glucocorticoids.