Researchers on verge of epilepsy breakthrough

Researchers in Halifax and Israel have made a promising discovery that could help doctors determine whether a person with a brain injury will develop epilepsy.

The study concluded that a type of brain activity called theta waves could be used to predict and prevent epileptic seizures, said Alon Friedman of the Brain Injury Centre at Dalhousie University.

Although promising drugs have been developed in preventing epilepsy, medical professionals need to first detect reliable “biomarkers” that predict which patients will develop the disease, he said.

“As long as you don’t know who will develop epilepsy, you cannot basically treat anyone,” Friedman said in a recent interview. “There are different treatments… to prevent epilepsy in patients after brain injury. The problem is that we cannot implement these treatments as long as we don’t know who should get (which treatment).”

The research is part of a joint project between Dalhousie and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel.

Friedman, a Dalhousie professor and the Dennis Chair in Epilepsy Research, moved to Dalhousie last year from Ben-Gurion, which houses the Brain Imaging Research Center and the Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience.

He has led the epilepsy/brain injury project for several years. The researchers monitored brain activity of mice and rats through surface electrodes (also known as electroencephalograms, or EEGs) in the search for an epilepsy biomarker.

The rodents were exposed to conditions that are very similar to brain injury in people, Friedman said.

“We measured many different features of the EEG. We came up with theta-changing the dynamic (as being) the most predictable…. We did five different models of epilepsy in rodents so we’re pretty sure… this general pattern of changes in the brain reflects the process of epileptogenesis,” the scientific term for the development of epilepsy.

The research was done in labs in Israel, Germany, Italy and Halifax. It was supported with a $150,000 grant from the Nova Scotia Health Research Foundation as well as funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and similar programs in Europe, Israel and the United States.

Their paper was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that disturbs nerve cell activity in the brain. It causes seizures during which people experience uncontrolled shaking and movement or loss of consciousness.

The disorder affects 10-40 per cent of brain injury survivors and it can occur months or even years later. The theta wave biomarker may allow doctors not only to predict if a patient will develop epilepsy but when that will occur, Friedman said.

The next phase of the research will involve clinical trials in humans.

“We’re trying to find the resources to do the clinical research to confirm in patients that we can monitor these changes and indeed predict epilepsy,” which will take at least five years, Friedman said.