Originally published January 9 2006
Medical expert publishes study of epilepsy's development in children
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
In Neuron magazine, Yehezkel Ben-Ari has published a study that details the effects of seizures on young patients, including how seizures progress to the condition known as chronic epilepsy.
A major mystery in epilepsy research has been why infants are more prone to seizures than adults and how those seizures progress to chronic epilepsy.
Now, researchers have discovered that central to those seizures in the developing brain are neurons triggered by the neurotransmitter GABA.
In adults, epilepsy is caused by hyperactivation of neuronal receptors triggered by the neurotransmitter glutamate.
This excess activation unleashes the storm of uncontrolled nerve cell firing that underlies epilepsy.
In contrast, in adults the neurotransmitter GABA acts on its receptors to inhibit neurons.
Neurotransmitters such as glutamate and GABA are chemical signals that one neuron launches at its neighbor across connections called synapses.
Yehezkel Ben-Ari and colleagues decided to explore a possible role of GABA-controlled neural circuitry in seizures in infant animals because it was known that, while GABA excites immature neurons, it changes to an inhibitory neurotransmitter in adult neurons.
In their experiments described in the December 8, 2005, issue of Neuron, they used a preparation in which they isolated in three separate compartments the left and right hippocampi of baby rats and the nerve fibers connecting them.
With this experimental arrangement, they could use drugs to block GABA receptors and/or induce electrical seizure in one hippocampus and analyze whether such manipulations influenced seizure activity in the other.
They found that these GABA-triggered seizures featured so-called "fast oscillations" of electrical activity that are required to transform a "naive" network of neurons into an epileptic one.
As the neuronal network matures, however, the density of synapses triggered by glutamate increases and the contribution of GABA-triggered synapses to fast oscillations and development of epilepsy decreases, they wrote.
"This information may be important both for understanding the deleterious consequences of seizures in newborns and for developing new therapeutic treatments for seizures in young infants," wrote Ben-Ari and colleagues.
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