Now we know this will come a surprise to many of you, but parents do lose sleep over their children’s epilepsy.

Parents of young children with epilepsy often sleep in the same room or the same bed as their child to monitor their condition, but the bed-sharing may be interfering with restful sleep for both the parents and kids, new research finds.

In the study, published in the journal Epilepsia, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital for Children in Boston examined the sleeping arrangements of 105 families who had a child with the seizure disorder and 79 families whose children did not have epilepsy (“controls”).

The children ranged in age from 2 to 10 years. Among the children with epilepsy, about 41 percent had seizures within the first year of life, while the mean age of seizure onset was about 2 years. In addition, 64 percent had at least one seizure within the last month and 37 percent had daily seizures.

About 64 percent of parents who shared a bed with their epileptic child said they started co-sleeping after the diagnosis. About the same number — nearly two-thirds — said they didn’t co-sleep with their child’s non-epileptic siblings at that age.

“Our study determined that households with a child with epilepsy had higher rates of parent-child room sharing and co-sleeping compared to controls,” Dr. Elizabeth Thiele said in a journal news release.

About 69 percent of parents said they worried about their child having a seizure at night.

But being closer to their epileptic child wasn’t helping parents sleep any better. About 62 percent of parents said they slept more poorly since they started sharing a bed with their epileptic child, while 44 percent of parents said they “rarely” or “never” felt rested.

The study authors also found that children with epilepsy had more sleep problems, including waking up at night, being tired during the day and trouble going to bed at night.

“Our study demonstrates the profound impact of epilepsy on child and parent sleep patterns,” concluded Thiele.

Brain surgery can help patients with a drug-resistant strain of epilepsy

The number of children receiving brain surgery for epilepsy is set to almost treble (triple) under plans for a major expansion of services across England by 2016.

Operations to remove or modify part of the brain can help patients with a drug-resistant strain of the illness – but currently only 125 children a year (In the UK) benefit from the specialist surgery.

Great Ormond Street Hospital is the main centre performing these procedures, but from November existing services will be developed in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham, the NHS announced.

The move is expected to enable doctors to treat three times as many children as they currently do, with about 350 to benefit by 2015-16.

When referred to these services, a child will undergo a series of specialist investigations and assessments to determine whether they are suitable for the surgery, which prevents epileptic seizure in up to 80% of cases.

NHS Specialised Services said it could not provide a specific figure for how much the expansion would cost, but said money would be saved in the long run.

A spokesman said: “Savings will accrue to the NHS from subsequent reduced accident and emergency visits, in-patient stays and long-term drug treatment. The children and their families will benefit significantly.”

Epilepsy experts and charities welcomed the announcement.

Professor Helen Cross, the Prince of Wales’s chairwoman of childhood epilepsy at Great Ormond Street, said: “Having four expert services across the country will enable us to make this surgery available to far more children, as well as reduce current waiting times for assessment for possible surgery.”

Epilepsy Action deputy chief executive Simon Wigglesworth said: “This is a huge move forward that will help build skills and expertise in the field of epilepsy. Most importantly, it will give more children with difficult-to-control epilepsy a chance to have surgery which could significantly impact on their quality of lives.”

Copyright © 2012 The Press Association. All rights reserved. VIA Google Hosted news.

A brain study in infant rats demonstrates that the anti-epilepsy drug phenobarbital stunts neuronal growth, which could prompt new questions about using the first-line drug to treat epilepsy in human newborns.

In Annals of Neurology EarlyView posted online May 11, researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) report that the anti-epilepsy drug phenobarbital given to rat pups about a week old changed the way the animals’ brains were wired, causing cognitive abnormalities later in life.

The researchers say it has been known that some of the drugs used to treat epilepsy increase the amount of neurons that die shortly after birth in the rat brain, but, until this study, no one had shown whether this action had any adverse impact on subsequent brain development.

“Our study is the first to show that the exposure to these drugs — and just a single exposure — can prevent brain circuits from developing their normal connectivity, meaning they may not be wired correctly, which can have long-lasting effects on brain function,” says the study’s senior investigator, Karen Gale, Ph.D., a professor of pharmacology at GUMC. “These findings suggest that in the growing brain, these drugs are not as benign as one would like to believe.”

For their study, the Georgetown researchers studied four agents including phenobarbital.

“The good news is not all anti-epilepsy drugs have this disruptive effect in the animal studies,” Gale says.

The researchers found that the anti-epilepsy drug levetiracetam did not stunt synaptic growth. Animals treated with a third drug, lamotrigine, showed neural maturation, but it was delayed. An additional finding involved melatonin. When added to phenobarbital, it appeared to prevent the persistent adverse neural effects in the rat pups. Melatonin has been used clinically to protect cells from injury in humans.

“Many clinicians have been advocating for a reexamination of the use of these drugs in infants, and our findings provide experimental data to support that need,” says the study’s co-lead investigator, Patrick A. Forcelli, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow in the department of pharmacology and physiology at GUMC. “Phenobarbital has been used to treat seizures for over 100 years — well before a Food and Drug Administration approval process was established– and for more than 50 years, it has been the first drug of choice in the treatment of seizures in neonates.”

According to the Epilepsy Foundation, epilepsy affects more than 300,000 Americans under the age of 15. Seizures in neonates are relatively common, and seizureincidence peaks in the first year of life and remains at a high level up to age four.

Recent studies of IQ and other measurements of cognitive function in children have suggested that exposure to certain anti-epilepsy drugs, either in utero or infancy, affects brain function, but the issue is highly controversial, Forcelli says.

“Seizures do not happen to a normal healthy brain,” he says. “They are typically associated with, or are a result of, an injury or another neurological condition. So the issue is: what causes later deficits in function — the underlying condition, the seizures, or the drug used to treat the seizures or some combination of these? Our study in otherwise normal animals suggests that drugs by themselves can be a significant factor.”

The Georgetown researchers say their study was designed to look directly at the effect of the different drugs on normal growth of brain neural networks in otherwise normal animals.

This kind of study can only with research in animals, in which each component (condition, seizure and drug) can be controlled and examined separately and in combination.

This kind of study can only be performed in animal models, in which the drug effects can be examined separately from the effects of either seizures or other complications.

“We were looking for the link between acute drug actions seen in a week-old rat pup and the long-term behavioral deficits we and others have seen in rats and humans,” Forcelli says.

The researchers measured communication between neurons in an area of the brain known to be sensitive to anti-epilepsy drugs in baby rats that were 10, 14, or 18 days old. In normal, untreated rats, there was a dramatic increase in communication between neurons in this area during this eight-day period. But this maturation of neurons in the critical brain circuit was not seen in rats that had been treated a week earlier with a single therapeutic dose of phenobarbital or a different drug, phenytoin.

The researchers also tested the effect of the drugs after the pups reached early childhood, and found that those treated with phenobarbital were slow to learn.

“This is an important bridge between molecules and behavior that helps us to understand how early life drug exposure can permanently alter behavioral function in later life of the rats,” Forcelli says.

The research group is now planning to find out how the drugs affect brain development in infant animals that also have seizures.

Source: Georgetown University Medical Center via news-medical.net

“They were desperately trying to save him,” Cheryl James, told Ivanhoe. “I mean he was 19 years old, you don’t die at 19, right?”

Two months after he graduated high school, Cheryl James buried her seemingly healthy son, Drew.

“I said some strangers are going to call and tell me what happened to my son, and I rather you guys call and tell me what happened to my son,” Cheryl said.

Cheryl says Drew’s friends told her they saw him vomit and suffer seizures before he died.

“They brought me a can of monster nitrous and pretty much said they were almost confident that’s what killed drew,” she said.

Drew’s autopsy was inconclusive, but there have been numerous documented deaths and seizures associated with alcohol-free energy drinks.

“What’s on the label doesn’t necessarily mean what’s in the drink, and the amounts don’t necessarily coordinate either,” Mindy black, a registered dietician, explained.

Mindy black says a key ingredient to check for is caffeine. Too much can cause heart palpitations, seizures or sudden death. In some cases it can trigger unknown preexisting heart conditions.

“They don’t recommend you to have more than 300 mg of caffeine a day and kids should not have more than 100,” Black said.

Kids under 12 don’t need more than 80. Also important is sugar.

“If we had 2 of these [drinks] a day for a week that’s almost a pound a week in fat,” Black said.

1 amp energy drink is equal to six glazed donuts. One full throttle equals eleven butter croissants! And for the cans that tout extra energy boosters like taurine, ginseng, ginko orguarana, Black says don’t pay extra money because the amounts that they put in the can are not enough to actually work. If you’re looking for a boost switch energy drinks for water! 75 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated, a top reason for fatigue!

“If we’re dehydrated a lot of our organs and vital systems are slowing down which can make us lethargic and tired,” Black said.

Drinking cold water can increase energy for up to two hours. Also, don’t skip meals.

“Most Americans only get 10 grams of fiber a day, we actually need more like 30,”Black said.

A diet rich in fiber, B-vitamins, magnesium and omega-3’s will help boost and stabilize energy. Some of the best snacks to get you out of a funk are almonds, edamame, oatmeal, whole wheat toast, greek yogurt and low-fat popcorn. They’re packed with things to help recharge your battery! Finally, get moving!

“Just a 10 minute brisk walk will increase your energy stores for about 2 hours,” Black said.

If you insist on a drink, Black says go with ‘5 hour energy.’ While the sugar free shot is made up of key vitamins and amino acids, the label doesn’t show if there’s enough of each to be effective.

“Some people say if it works, and it’s in your head than it’s worth it,” Black said.

If you prefer energy in a can, Black says an occasional drink is no big deal, but too many, too often, can be toxic. Cheryl believes her son is proof of that danger.

“I definitely never thought it would be a drug they sell in the store that would kill my son,” Cheryl said.

While some energy drinks have the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee, experts say the addition of other stimulants is what makes them more dangerous. People who should stay away from energy drinks include kids under 12, people taking certain medications, or those who have heart disease or hypertension.

SURVEY SAYS:  According to self-report surveys, energy drinks are consumed by 30% to 50% of adolescents and young adults. Of the 5,448 US caffeine overdoses reported in 2007, 46% occurred in those younger than 19 –years-old. The problem is not just an American one. Several countries and states have debated or restricted their sales and advertising. Denmark, Turkey and Uruguay have banned them; Norway prohibits sales to children under 15.

RESEARCH & REVIEWS: One review of the effects of high-caffeine energy drinks on children and young adults found that they have been linked to an array of serious events like heart palpitations, high blood pressure, cardiac arrest and death. They may also pose additional risks to young people who take medication or have chronic illnesses. A study published in the journal Pediatrics urges pediatricians to discuss the risks of energy drinks with patients, especially those with heart conditions and mood or behavioral disorders, like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The high amounts of sugar can also pose risks to those with diabetes. Last October, the National Federation of State High School Associations cautioned that caffeinated energy drinks (which are often confused with products like Gatorade, a fluid replacement drink) should not be consumed before, during or after physical activity because they could raise the risk of dehydration and increase the chance of potentially fatal heat illnesses. (SOURCE: pediatrics.aappublications.org)

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Experts say energy drinks have no therapeutic benefit, and many ingredients are understudied and not regulated. The known and unknown pharmacology of agents included in such drinks, combined with reports of toxicity, raises concern for potentially serious adverse effects in association with energy-drink use. In the short-term, pediatricians need to be aware of the possible effects of energy drinks in vulnerable populations and screen for consumption to educate families. Long-term research should aim to understand the effects in at-risk populations. Toxicity surveillance should be improved, and regulations of energy-drink sales and consumption should be based on appropriate research.

An average energy drink contains 70 to 80 milligrams of caffeine per eight-ounce serving, that’s about three times the concentration of some sodas, but may derive extra caffeine from other ingredients, like kola nut, cocoa and guarana.

The trade group, American Beverage Association says the study presents misinformation about energy drinks, and that an average energy drink contains only half the caffeine of a cup of coffeehouse coffee.

What are the top things that boost your energy?

 Mindy Black: We can boost our energy through easy food items. The first thing I do is make sure they’re drinking enough water because our body is made up of 60% water. If we’re dehydrated, a lot of our organs and vital systems are slowing down, which can make us lethargic and tired. I recommend ½ your body weight in water ounces a day. It seems like a lot, but if you’re drinking that during the day, it’s only about 4 or 5 bottles of water that you can pick up around town. It’s not that much and that way you can have a natural and free energy booster.

 How much of a difference does it make?

Mindy Black: If we drink water, especially cold water, we can increase our energy for up to 2 hours after drinking it. It can make a big difference especially if you’re drinking caffeine. Caffeine dehydrates us for 24 hours, and alcohol for 72 hours, so if you’re doing one of those things throughout each day, then you’re probably walking around constantly dehydrated, which is going to make you constantly fatigued.

 What’s another one?

Mindy Black: Just make sure you’re getting a variety in your diet because if we’re eating the same thing every day, we might be missing important nutrients. For instance, B vitamins help breakdown glucose into what we use for energy, so if we’re not getting enough B vitamins, which are found in whole grains, whole grain or whole wheat bread, then you’re not getting your B vitamins. That will help. Magnesium is the same way; it helps break down glucose for energy. That’s going to be found in fatty fishes, nuts and seeds. Other things that help with energy are Omega 3’s. We hear about that helping our heart, but it also helps with increased energy and mood.

 How many servings of those a day?

Mindy Black: As far as B vitamins go, if we just had oatmeal in the morning that’s going to get your daily needs in. If you’re looking at Omega 3’s, if we’re getting in 3 servings of fish a week or so then you’re getting your Omega 3’s in pretty easily. Some other ones are fiber. Most Americans only get about 10 grams of fiber a day. We actually need more like 30. We always hear that it keeps us regular, but it also helps slow down the metabolism of our food. It slows down how quickly we’re digesting things so we can get a constant blood sugar going instead of a spike, and then a crash down later on that leaves us fatigued.

 What are some of the best sources of it fiber?

Mindy Black: Fruits and vegetables are going to be your best source or whole grains, so anything that’s like a whole grain or a whole oat like breads, cereals and pastas will help increase your fiber intake.

 What else?

Mindy Black: A big one is to not skip meals. The way our blood sugars work is they regulate our energy levels. If our blood sugars are low, we feel lethargic; we usually get headaches or get kind of crabby. If they’re low then we’re going to be reaching for the energy drinks. Our blood sugars after a meal stay stable for 2 to 3 hours, so if we skip a meal or if we skip breakfast, especially if we haven’t eaten since 7 o’clock the night before, we’re running on empty fuel. I always recommend that people eat breakfast No.1 and then eat 3 to 4 hours after that throughout the day, little snacks or meals.

 What about people that say they’re not a breakfast person?

Mindy Black: A lot of people say that and a lot of the people that say they’re not hungry is probably because you haven’t been eating breakfast for the past 5 years. We have a little caveman inside of us. He has no idea it’s 2012 and there’s a Starbuck’s on every corner. Since you’re gone 5 hours without eating breakfast, this caveman thinks you’re a crappy hunter and cannot get food in the morning, so after about 2 weeks of eating breakfast your body starts saying ok I’m hungry now and you start waking up hungry. That actually scares a lot of people, but that means your metabolism is actually working so it’s a good sign.

 How about exercise?

Mindy Black: A lot of people will complain especially at 3 o’clock in the afternoon that they’re really tired and they need energy especially if you have a desk job. You’ve been sitting at your desk for hours then we’re not getting the circulation we need to get all the nutrients that we need throughout the body, so even once an hour just get up and move, that’s going to help with your energy. They’ve done studies and just a 10 minute brisk walk will increase your energy storage for about 2 hours. If you can go on a 10 minute walk at lunch, that can help you throughout the afternoon. Just one 10 minute walk and that’s going to help boost you for 2 hours. If you can’t do that, then at least just once an hour getting up and moving around your desk works.

What is the difference between exercises?

Mindy Black: Any exercise is going to boost your metabolism as long as you’re eating. If you’re not eating at all and going to exercise, you’re going to be fatigued afterwards. Any exercise is going to increase that circulation, which increase your oxygen levels. Getting the nutrients around whether it be just walking around the block or going to a boot camp, you’re going to be able to increase your energy absolutely.

 Is there any mistake that people can make that gets them tired?

Mindy Black: Definitely. Eating large bouts of sugars. A lot of times at 3 o’clock, the vending machine is right down the hallway and we’re like ‘I really need some energy’ so I’m going to go get a candy bar. What happens there is, we eat a candy bar and we feel awesome for about 20 minutes because it breaks down immediately into sugar and our blood sugars spike up. Then, about 45 minutes later we’re coming crashing down. If you’re surviving throughout the day on say maybe having a donut for breakfast and then a Coca Cola around 10, then cookies or chocolate in the afternoon, you’re doing spikes all day long and you’re definitely going to crash. I would definitely avoid that and have more of a snack that has a little bit of quality protein in it. You can have an apple with some peanut butter or a piece of fruit with some cheese or hummus, and carrots or something like that’s going to hold you over a lot better.

 Anything else that drains our energy?

Mindy Black: If you’re not sleeping that’s going to drain your energy. They’ve done numerous studies showing that you need at least 5 hours of sleep to be able to replenish all your cells. If we’re skipping out on sleep, you’re going to be fatigued the rest of the day. If you can get a power nap in for 20 minutes that will help you with your energy. The other thing would be relying on too much caffeine because caffeine is kind of a false sense of energy, so as soon as we use it up, we’re going to crash right down.

 Can you talk about energy drinks?

Mindy Black: Most energy drinks are made up of caffeine, sugar or sugar substitute. A lot of them will market that they’re caffeine free, what that means is that they’re not using synthetic caffeine but they might be using a natural caffeine such as Kava or koala nut. It is still caffeine and caffeine in small doses has been seen to be helpful whether it be we’re running a block or trying to get through our day, but if you’re relying on large amounts of caffeine, not only can we get addicted to it, but it can cause GI distress, nervousness, irritability and high blood pressure. They don’t recommend that you have more than 300 mgs of caffeine a day. Kids shouldn’t have any more than 100 mgs a day. To put that in perspective, a Coca-Cola has about 35 mgs. These drinks range anywhere from 80 to 280, so if you’re picking one that has 280 out and you’re doing that a couple of times a day, we’re grossly over the limit of what we need to be caffeine wise.

 Are there long term effects from drinking too many energy drinks

Mindy Black: Being addicted to caffeine. If you’ve ever talked to people that try to get off Mountain Dew or any other caffeine substance, they say they have really bad headaches and they’re irritable. Same thing that happens with these.

Source: Ivanhoe News Service

50% of Patients Seizure-Free After Trying First Anti-Seizure Drug

Half of all epilepsy patients who are initially started on one anti-seizure drug remain seizure-free for at least a year, a new study confirms.

Among patients followed for as long as 26 years, initial response to drug treatments strongly predicted future seizure control.

Yet less than 1% of patients who failed to respond to three anti-seizure drug regimens achieved adequate seizure control on subsequent drug treatments even though some were treated with as many as nine different drugs or drug combinations.

The findings make it clear that epilepsy patients who are candidates for surgery or other non-drug treatments should be considered for these procedures earlier rather than later, says neurologist Patricia E. Penovich, MD, of the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Epilepsy Group in St. Paul.

“These patients don’t have to wait until they have failed five or six different drug regimens,” she tells WebMD. “If their seizures are not controlled by the first few medications it is reasonable to consider surgery.”

Roughly 2.7 million Americans have epilepsy, and about 1 in 10 people will experience a seizure at some point in their lifetime, according to the Epilepsy Foundation.

More than a dozen different drugs can be used to control seizures, and decisions about which medication to try first are made by considering individual patient characteristics, including age, sex, seizure type, and financial circumstance.

The new research is among the first to examine long-term outcomes in newly diagnosed patients, says researcher Patrick Kwan, MD, PhD, of Australia’s University of Melbourne.

The study included about 1,100 epilepsy patients in Scotland and followed them from their first drug treatment for as few as two years and as many as 26 years.

Patients were considered seizure-free if they had no seizures for at least a year without changing their drug regimen.

If seizures continued, a second drug was given, either alone or in combination with the first. And if seizures still were not controlled, different drugs or drug combinations were tried, with some receiving up to nine different drug regimens.

1 in 4 Patients Never Seizure-Free

Among the major findings:

• 50% of patients were seizure free on the first drug they tried and an additional 13% were seizure free after trying a second drug.
• 37% of patients became seizure-free within six months of starting treatment, and an additional 22% became seizure-free after more than six months.
• 1 in 4 patients were never free of seizures for a complete year during the study period.

The study appears online ahead of publication in the May 15 issue of the journalNeurology.

In an accompanying editorial, Penovich and neurologist Michael Gruenthal, MD, PhD, of the Albany Medical Center in New York, write that the new research identifies important patterns of treatment response.

They conclude that failure of two drug regimens in patients who take their medications as directed strongly predicts poor response to future drug therapies.

“We interpret this as compelling evidence that patients who do not respond to two regimens should be offered additional evaluations to verify the diagnosis of epilepsy and identify potential opportunities for surgical treatment,” they write.

Source: WebMD

A new study found that about 50 percent of people became seizure-free after the first medication they took. By contrast, only 13 percent became seizure-free after the second drug was tried, and just 4 percent were seizure-free after a third drug was tried.

“The long-term treatment outcome is fairly constant, and thus predictable early on, in most people with epilepsy,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Patrick Kwan, a professor of neurology at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. “Few patients become seizure-free after failure of the first two medications tried,” he added.

Results of the study are published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Neurology.

Epilepsy is a seizure disorder. You generally have to have two or more unexplained seizures to be diagnosed with epilepsy, according to the Epilepsy Foundation. About 70 million people have epilepsy worldwide, according to background information in the study.

A number of medications are available to stop seizures, and these may be given alone or in combination. Brain surgery and other non-drug options are available for treating epilepsy.

The current study included nearly 1,100 people aged 9 to 93 who were newly diagnosed with epilepsy and prescribed one medication as their initial treatment. The median age of the study volunteers was 32 years, and they were followed for up to 26 years.

Sixty-eight percent were seizure-free at the final clinic visit. Sixty-two percent of those people were seizure-free on a single drug therapy. Study participants were considered seizure-free if they hadn’t had a seizure in at least a year without any changes in their treatment.

The response to the first medication tried often predicted how a patient might respond to additional medications. Half responded to the first medication tried and became seizure-free.

For those who had to take a second drug, either alone or in combination with another drug, 13 percent became seizure-free. When a third drug had to be tried, just 4 percent became seizure-free. By the fifth drug tried, less than 1 percent became seizure-free.

Overall, 37 percent of those trying medications became seizure-free immediately. Another 22 percent became seizure-free within six months of starting treatment.

Sixteen percent had what’s known as relapsing-remitting seizures. After being seizure-free for a year or more, they had as many as five periods of seizure relapse.

Twenty-five percent never became seizure-free, according to the study.

“Given that epilepsy can be controlled with medications in the majority of patients — nearly 70 percent — a lack of response should call for re-evaluation for conditions other than epilepsy,” Kwan said, adding that if you haven’t responded to the first two drugs your doctor tries, you should be seen by a physician at a specialized epilepsy center for non-drug treatments.

Dr. Cynthia Harden, chief of the division of epilepsy and electroencephalography at the Cushing Neuroscience Institute in Great Neck, N.Y., agreed. “Most people do well on the first or second drug. Some people need a combination to become seizure free. But, if someone fails monotherapy and combination therapy, it’s time to think about options other than drugs,” she said.

“Surgery, for the right patient, is the only disease-altering treatment. It can stop seizures completely,” she explained, and added that a newer technique called laser-ablation therapy can also be helpful.

Source Health Day News

ORLANDO, Fla., May 9, 2012 – In less than one year since its inception, the Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Florida Hospital for Children has been awarded the designation of a Level 4 Epilepsy Center, which is the highest designation for epilepsy centers in the nation. The designation was awarded by the National Association of Epilepsy Centers (NAEC), which evaluates the appropriateness and quality of specialized epilepsy care.

“Being named a Level 4 Epilepsy Center shows the Central Florida community that Florida Hospital for Children is committed to providing the best care available to children suffering from epilepsy,” said Dr. Ki Hyeong Lee, medical director of the Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Florida Hospital for Children. “It takes a multi-disciplinary team of physicians, nurses, researchers, therapists and others to create a comprehensive center that offers the best medical treatment for epilepsy.”

The Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Florida Hospital for Children is led by Dr. Lee and surgical director Dr. James Baumgartner. The center offers patients and families access to a multi-disciplinary approach and provides patients with access to a variety of treatments ranging from innovative non-surgical options, such as the ketogenic diet, to advanced surgical treatments, including operating rooms with the only intraoperative 3T MRI functionality in Central Florida.

Michele Peters saw her daughter suffer from epilepsy for more than 10 years without answers. “Mackenzie had suffered a stroke in the womb which had led to years of suffering from unexpected seizures,” said Michele. “Our family had tried a variety of medications but nothing seemed to work.”

At Florida Hospital for Children, Mackenzie underwent surgery to remove the part of her brain that had been causing her seizures using the latest technology available to help the physicians be as precise as possible and minimize the need for additional surgeries. Today, she is seizure free and able to enjoy activities that a normal fifth grader is supposed to enjoy without the constant worry of seizures.

“I cannot thank the team at Florida Hospital for Children enough,” said Michele. “I hope that other families see this designation of a Level 4 Epilepsy Center as a sign of hope and comfort that there is an epilepsy center right here in our community that can provide the best care possible. Mackenzie is now completely seizure free and back to doing her favorite activities: swimming, riding her horse and climbing trees. She is a normal kid again.”

According to NAEC, a fourth-level center should provide the more complex forms of intensive neurodiagnostics monitoring, as well as more extensive medical, neuropsychological and psychosocial treatment. Fourth-level centers also offer a complete evaluation for epilepsy surgery, including intracranial electrodes, and provide a broad range of surgical procedures for epilepsy.

For more information on The Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center at Florida Hospital for Children, please call 407-303-KIDS.

“Our data clearly indicate that glycogen accumulation alone kills neurons and thus dramatically reduces lifespan,” explains Guinovart, an expert in glycogen metabolism, group leader at IRB Barcelona, and senior professor at the University of Barcelona, “because the only thing we have manipulated in the neurons is their capacity to produce glycogen.”

The inclusion of the Drosophila fly in the study provides in vivo confirmation of the theory in another animal model as these flies also show the same symptoms of degeneration as mice when glycogen accumulates in neurons. However, in addition the use of Drosophila will speed upobtaining genetic data and the screening of therapeutic molecules. “In a short time we will be able to perform a massive search for genes involved in the pathological process and to understand it better at the molecular level,” emphasizes Marco Milán, ICREA researcher at IRB Barcelona and a specialist in Drosophila. ”But the flies will also be useful to identify pharmacological molecules that can cure,” he explains.

The IRB Barcelona teams are designing several experiments to identify the possible therapeutic targets that may be useful to prevent glycogen accumulation in neurons. In addition to the direct relation to Lafora epilepsy, a progressive degenerative disease that affects adolescents and has no cure, glycogen accumulation could be the main cause of other neurodegenerative illnesses such as Adult polyglucosan body disease and Andersen’s disease.

Source: ScienceDaily

“Every parent asks, ‘What can I do to prevent my child from harm?’” says Tobias Loddenkemper, MD, a neurologist in the Epilepsy Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. Loddenkemper also wanted to better understand his patients’ seizure patterns so he could better time the dosing of their medications. He’s been testing a wristband sensor system, developed by Rosalind Picard, ScD, and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab (Epilepsia, March 20), and thinks it could be part of the solution.

The wristband carries two kinds of sensors: One, a motion detector, used in some iPhones to detect tilts and shakes, detects the repetitive movements of a convulsion. The other, a skin conductance measurer like those used in lie detectors, is sensitive to tiny amounts of sweat, indicating activation of the sympathetic nervous system. Combining this information, the system could be programmed to sound an alarm when a predetermined threshold is reached.

Picard developed the wristband to get objective physiologic measures of emotional states, such as anticipating meltdowns in autistic children. At the time, a graduate student in her lab, Miriam Madsen, was also doing research at Boston Children’s, and connected Picard with her father, Joseph Madsen, MD, a neurosurgeon at the hospital. The two institutions began collaborating, studying the relationships between wristband indicators of emotion and brain signals from children with epilepsy.

During the course of their study, 80 children wore the wristband during EEG monitoring. The EEGs documented 16 generalized tonic-clonic seizures (full-blown seizures involving stiffening and shaking of the body and loss of consciousness, also known as grand mal seizures) in seven children. Fifteen of the 16 were also detected by the wristband.

The other 73 patients never had a seizure. Over the course of some 3,500 monitoring hours, their wristbands sounded a total of 102 false alarms, occurring at least once in about a third of the children. (Four children accounted for a large number of them — through dice-throwing, gaming on the Nintendo Wii or hand flapping, common in developmental delay and autism). Loddenkemper believes these false alarms will diminish as the systems get “trained” with more and more data; eventually, the wristband could be taught to recognize what seizures look like in different individuals.

In the future, the wristband could potentially transmit data wirelessly to physicians, or into a seizure diary. “It is very difficult to obtain a good seizure diary, especially if the seizures are nocturnal,” says Loddenkemper. “We need an independent measure.”

Although his study was limited to generalized tonic-clonic seizures, a new study is underway to test the wristband’s ability to detect more subtle seizures. Loddenkemper, fellow Boston Children’s neurologist Alex Rotenberg, MD, PhD, and Bryan McLaughlin, PhD, at Draper Laboratory have a grant from CIMITto develop a sensor that would sit under the ear, connecting wirelessly to electrodes on the scalp or implanted on the brain itself.

In a related study, Loddenkemper’s team found evidence that patterns of autonomic nervous system activity, detected by the wristband system, could identify children at heightened risk for sudden death from epilepsy – warranting especially close surveillance. “Children with severe epilepsy have an increased risk of dying during seizures,” notes Loddenkemper. “A closed-loop sensor system may enable us to prevent this.”

Nancy Fliesler, Vector’s editor, has been senior science writer at Children’s Hospital Boston since 2003, spotting innovation trends and covering virtually every clinical and laboratory research department in the hospital. She previously worked for the ABC News medical unit, helped produce science programs for K-8 teachers for the Harvard-Smithsonian Science Media Group, and worked on video productions for the Mental Illness Education Project. Prior to that, she was executive editor of Journal Watch, and also produced and directed the award-winning documentary Lifestyles of the Poor and Unknown. She holds a BA from Oberlin College (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MS in science and medical journalism from Boston University.

But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons in the living brain. The researchers have shown that a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting computer algorithm can identify and record from neurons in the living mouse brain with better accuracy and speed than a human experimenter.

The new automated process eliminates the need for months of training and provides long-sought information about living cells’ activities. Using this technique, scientists could classify the thousands of different types of cells in the brain, map how they connect to each other, and figure out how diseased cells differ from normal cells.

The project is a collaboration between the labs of Ed Boyden, associate professor of biological engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, and Craig Forest, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

“Our team has been interdisciplinary from the beginning, and this has enabled us to bring the principles of precision machine design to bear upon the study of the living brain,” Forest says. His graduate student, Suhasa Kodandaramaiah, spent the past two years as a visiting student at MIT, and is the lead author of the study, which appears in the May 6 issue of Nature Methods.

The method could be particularly useful in studying brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, autism and epilepsy, Boyden says. “In all these cases, a molecular description of a cell that is integrated with [its] electrical and circuit properties – has remained elusive,” says Boyden, who is a member of MIT’s Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “If we could really describe how diseases change molecules in specific cells within the living brain, it might enable better drug targets to be found.”

Kodandaramaiah, Boyden and Forest set out to automate a 30-year-old technique known as whole-cell patch clamping, which involves bringing a tiny hollow glass pipette in contact with the cell membrane of a neuron, then opening up a small pore in the membrane to record the electrical activity within the cell. This skill usually takes a graduate student or postdoc several months to learn.

Kodandaramaiah spent about four months learning the manual patch-clamp technique, giving him an appreciation for its difficulty. “When I got reasonably good at it, I could sense that even though it is an art form, it can be reduced to a set of stereotyped tasks and decisions that could be executed by a robot,” he says.

To that end, Kodandaramaiah and his colleagues built a robotic arm that lowers a glass pipette into the brain of an anesthetized mouse with micrometer accuracy. As it moves, the pipette monitors a property called electrical impedance – a measure of how difficult it is for electricity to flow out of the pipette. If there are no cells around, electricity flows and impedance is low. When the tip hits a cell, electricity can’t flow as well and impedance goes up.

The pipette takes two-micrometer steps, measuring impedance 10 times per second. Once it detects a cell, it can stop instantly, preventing it from poking through the membrane. “This is something a robot can do that a human can’t,” Boyden says.

Once the pipette finds a cell, it applies suction to form a seal with the cell’s membrane. Then, the electrode can break through the membrane to record the cell’s internal electrical activity. The robotic system can detect cells with 90 percent accuracy, and establish a connection with the detected cells about 40 percent of the time.

The researchers also showed that their method can be used to determine the shape of the cell by injecting a dye; they are now working on extracting a cell’s contents to read its genetic profile.

Development of the new technology was funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the MIT Media Lab.

The researchers recently created a startup company, Neuromatic Devices, to commercialize the device.

The researchers are now working on scaling up the number of electrodes so they can record from multiple neurons at a time, potentially allowing them to determine how different parts of the brain are connected.

They are also working with collaborators to start classifying the thousands of types of neurons found in the brain. This “parts list” for the brain would identify neurons not only by their shape – which is the most common means of classification – but also by their electrical activity and genetic profile.

“If you really want to know what a neuron is, you can look at the shape, and you can look at how it fires. Then, if you pull out the genetic information, you can really know what’s going on,” Forest says. “Now you know everything. That’s the whole picture.”

Boyden says he believes this is just the beginning of using robotics in neuroscience to study living animals. A robot like this could potentially be used to infuse drugs at targeted points in the brain, or to deliver gene therapy vectors. He hopes it will also inspire neuroscientists to pursue other kinds of robotic automation – such as in optogenetics, the use of light to perturb targeted neural circuits and determine the causal role that neurons play in brain functions.

Neuroscience is one of the few areas of biology in which robots have yet to make a big impact, Boyden says. “The genome project was done by humans and a giant set of robots that would do all the genome sequencing. In directed evolution or in synthetic biology, robots do a lot of the molecular biology,” he says. “In other parts of biology, robots are essential.”

Other co-authors include MIT grad student Giovanni Talei Franzesi and MIT postdoc Brian Y. Chow.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology Research News