Grace Vollmar
Pronouns: She/her
Research Mentor(s): Wei-Chih Chang
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Neurology / Medicine
Program:
Authors: Grace Vollmar, William Stacey, Goeffrey Murphy, Wei-Chih Chang
Session: Session 4: 1:40 pm – 2:30 pm
Poster: 16
Abstract
Epileptic seizures greatly disturb patients’ lives, yet there is still no reliable way to predict when a seizure is going to occur. This project’s goal is to study the electrographic changes in the brain that signal impending seizures in an animal model of temporal lobe epilepsy. Tetanus toxin (TeNT, 20 ng) was injected into the right hippocampi of two female rats (~300 g); stimulating electrodes and recording electrodes for electroencephalograms and local field potentials were implanted at the same time of the surgeries. The animals were video monitored for behavioral seizures, and the brain activity was recorded simultaneously and continuously. The first seizures started to present in two weeks after TeNT injection, and animals were expected to remain epileptic for two months. Seizures were detected manually from the recording, and the pre-seizure time was extracted for use. The quality and quantity changes of the pre-seizure recording were examined correlating with the onsets of seizures. Evoked responses induced by electrical stimuli were compared to brain activity without electrical stimuli. Together, we report common features in the brain that appear before a seizure to better predict seizures in the future, and evidence electrical probing could be an idea to reveal the proximity of seizures.
