Madison Kang
Research Mentor: Wei-Chih Chang
Mentor Department: Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Medicine
Author(s): Madison Kang
Session: Session 4 (1:00 PM – 1:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 15
Abstract
Epilepsy is one of the most common chronic neurological disorders, affecting over 0.5% of the population. Epilepsy is characterized by recurrent and spontaneous seizures caused by excessive and synchronous firing of neurons. Seizures happen suddenly and devastate patients’ lives, which has promoted studies in seizure forecasting for decades. However, in all previous studies using passive recordings, no universal pre-seizure biomarkers have been found that could signal the approach of seizures in different patients or animal models. My mentor’s recent study showed that features from perturbation-evoked responses accurately discriminate the pre-seizure state from all seizure-free periods. Before future clinical applications, the theory needs to be validated in other models, which led to my UROP project. I searched for features from perturbation-evoked responses in two in vitro models of epilepsy and sought the correlations between the features and the proximity of seizures. In the in vitro rat model, CA3 generated interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs), which are seen as the intrinsic perturbation; seizures occurred in CA1, and CA1 received IEDs. I discovered the trend between the areas under the curve from the CA1 IEDs and seizure onsets. In the model using mice, I induced epileptiform activities in brain slices, but not seizures yet.
