How stress builds seizures for patients with epilepsy

Published in the journal Science Signaling, the researchers reveal how epilepsy alters the way the brain reacts to stress to cause seizures.

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures, which are sudden surges of electrical activity in the brain.

According to the Epilepsy Foundation, around 1.3-2.8 million people in the United States have epilepsy. Each year, around 48 in every 100,000 Americans develop the condition.

While Neurological Specialties recommend that patients with epilepsy avoid stressful situations as a way of avoiding stress-induced seizures, it is not always possible to do so, highlighting the need for a therapeutic alternative.

However, because scientists have been unclear about how stress causes seizures, such a treatment has proven difficult to find.

For their study, the researchers focused on analyzing the activity of corticotrophin-releasing factor (CRF) in the brains of rats with and without epilepsy.

CRF is a neurotransmitter - a chemical that enables communication between nerve cells - that regulates the behavioral response to stress.

The researchers assessed how CRF affected the piriform cortex of the rodents, which is a region of the brain in which seizures are known to occur among humans with epilepsy.

When we used CRF on the epileptic brain, the polarity of the effect flipped; it went from inhibiting the piriform cortex to exciting it," explains Poulter. "At that point we became excited, and decided to explore exactly why this was happening.