Epilepsy-induced Brain Cell Damage Prevented in the Laboratory

ScienceDaily (Oct. 30, 2007) — "For some epilepsy patients, the side effects of epilepsy can be as troubling as the seizures. One pressing concern is the cognitive impairment seizures often inflict, which potentially includes memory loss, slowed reactions and reduced attention spans.

Now scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have directly observed seizure-induced structural changes in brain cells in laboratory animals. They report in The Journal of Neuroscience that the insights they gained allowed them to use a drug to block those changes in the brain.

'Assuming that these structural changes are linked to cognitive impairment -- and there's a lot of data to suggest that's true -- then this could provide us with a path to therapies that reduce cognitive problems in epilepsy,' says senior author Michael Wong, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, of anatomy and neurobiology, and of pediatrics."

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