EPILEPSY TORONTO » Resource Centre

	SCOTIABANK BUSKERFEST A HUGE SUCCESS Scotiabank BuskerFest and BuskerBall were once again a huge success with over one million people attending the four day busker festival. The festival was a great opportunity for raising awareness about epilepsy and many people came to our Epilepsy Information Booth to spin the Epilepsy Quiz wheel, talk about their connections with epilepsy and learn more about this condition. Our heartfelt thanks to all who attended and we'll see you again next year! Don't forget about the Scotiabank Waterfront Marathon coming up September 26th - we need you there purple and proud running or walking to raise pledges to help people living with epilepsy. Contact Nicole at 416 964-9095 or nnelson@epilepsytoronto.org for more information or to register.
		Posted on September 1st, 2010

	SMARTPHONE APP WOULD CONSTANTLY MONITOR EPILEPSY PATIENTS Computerworld - Engineers and medical experts have joined forces in Chicago to create a small prototype device and complex software that can monitor brainwaves of people with epilepsy and then send them from a patient's smartphone to a monitoring center for analysis. The team hopes that once the techology and software is developed, the data gathered could be used to warn epileptics in real-time that a seizure may be imminent, giving time to quickly stop driving or operating equipment. Data compiled from epileptic children could be interpreted by software in the child's smartphone, which would send a text message to a parent or guardian for help when needed. "Making an emergency call for a patient in need is one of those huge unprecedented wins from this technology," said Sam Cinquegrani, CEO of Wave Technology Group. Wave software engineers are collaborating on the project with staffers at the University of Chicago Hospital's Pediatric Epilepsy Center. Part of what inspired the project at Wave Technology is personal. Cinquegrani said he stuttered as a child, which some doctors said may be due to mild epilepsy. "I grew out of it and a lot of children do, but it made an impression," he said. Cinquegrani said he met leaders in the university hospital's epilepsy center a decade ago, which "gave me an opportunity to give back. We're excited about this because we can make a difference and give some quality of life back to children." An estimated 3 million people in the U.S. have epilepsy, and 10% of the cases are so severe that patients could have several seizures a day, he explained. "Some people are in danger of dying from it," he added. Since the new technology is designed to run on mobile devices, brain wave data could be gathered constantly to allow doctors to compute trends that would help in a patient's long-term care. Also, a compilation of data collected from many patients could be stored in a nationwide database where researchers could analyze it to come up with future treatments and cures, Cinquegrani said. The prototype now in development includes a small 16-channel amplifier - smaller than a credit card -- that would be attached by wires to sensors on a patient's head. In the current design, a hat with a pocket sewn inside would be used to carry the amplifier. The software would control the gathering of brain wave data by the amplifier and the ability to send it via Bluetooth to a smartphone carried by the patient, and from there to a typical cellular network for transfer to a monitoring center. Field-testing on the prototype should be underway by year's end, with a review and approval by the Food and Drug Administration expected sometime in late 2011, Cinquegrani said. Wave Technology already has several patents for software to be used in the system, which the company plans to sell as a service that would cost $1,500 to $2,500 per patient per year. The projected price tag would be a fraction of the cost of monitoring and treating epileptic patients for one or more days in a hospital, Cinquegrani said. The cost of the service could well be covered by insurers. Even a typical electroencephalogram (EEG) machine for monitoring the electrical activity of the brain can cost a hospital $10,000, and the process often requires using wires to carry data, meaning a patient must remain in a room during monitoring. With about 100 epilepsy centers in the nation, it is only possible to treat and monitor some 1,000 patients at a time today, but the need is obviously many times higher, Cinquegrani said. The small amplifier is being built by TMSI based in the Netherlands, he said. Currently, a larger TMSI amplifier is being used by Wave Technology engineers to test code for forwarding patient data to a smartphone and then to a server in a monitoring center. The University of Chicago Hospital today uses a larger amplifier connected to a laptop for epilepsy monitoring, Cinquegrani said. That system isn't mobile, he added. One of Wave Technology's patents is for an SMS (Short Message Service) remote application handler, which can be used on a smartphone to launch an application there. That technology will be valuable for expanding the functions that the amplifier can be used to detect, such as heart rates and data from blood sugar tests for diabetic patients, Cinquegrani said. The amplifier will be equipped with a chip that can store data in case of an interruption in a wireless connection. Initially, the development team is working to support smartphones running Android, Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry. The iPhone is also a prime candidate, but Apple thus far has not exposed all the Application Programming Interfaces needed by the engineering team, Cinquegrani said. The cost of building the technology, now being called the Wave EEG Monitor, comes from revenues generated by other parts of the Wave Technology business. Forty engineers have worked on the project, which started in November 2009.
		Posted on August 19th, 2010

	DEVELOPING NEW TREATMENTS FOR SEIZURES People with epilepsy have more treatment options than ever before. There are now 20 antiepileptic drugs approved for use and many more are in development. The use of surgery has been greatly refined, and new surgical techniques have been developed. People also may be treated with vagus nerve stimulation or the ketogenic diet in some cases. Individuals with seizures that are not controlled by drugs or surgery, however, make up approximately 25 to 30 percent of the epilepsy patient population. Even when seizures are controlled, the quality of life for some people with epilepsy is severely affected by the long- and short-term side effects of medication or surgery. Fortunately, the improved understanding of epilepsy resulting from research on epileptogenesis has led to many potential new treatments. Some of these treatments are now in clinical trials, while others are still in early development. If these treatments work as anticipated, they should greatly improve the care of people with epilepsy. Antiepileptic Drugs The large amount of research on epilepsy in recent decades has led to the development of many potential antiepileptic drugs. Some are similar to drugs that are already in use. • Brivaracetam and seletracetam are two new drugs that are chemically related to levetiracetam. Because of the way these drugs work, researchers believe they may be more potent than levetiracetam. Both drugs are now being tested in large clinical trials. • Some new drugs appear to work in completely new ways. These include retigabine, rufinamide, and lacosamide. Retigabine affects potassium channels in the cell membrane and may also affect the response to GABA. Rufinamide appears to affect sodium channels, and early clinical trials have shown that it can reduce treatment-resistant partial seizures and the seizures associated with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome. Both retigabine and rufinamide are now in clinical trials • A study showed that seizures could be blocked by bumetanide, a commonly used diuretic compound that blocks the effects of GABA release. While these results are preliminary, they suggest that bumetanide or related drugs might be a new way of treating seizures in young children.
		Posted on August 16th, 2010

	BRAIN'S IMMUNE SYSTEM MAY CAUSE SEIZURES ScienceDaily (August 2010) — Chronic seizures caused by traumatic head injuries may result from chemicals released by the brain's immune system attempting to repair the injured site, according to a study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The findings could help prevent one of the most common forms of adult epilepsy, called acquired epilepsy, which is often found in people who have suffered a brain injury or infection, according to CU-Boulder psychology and neuroscience Professor Daniel Barth, the study's chief author. For decades researchers have focused on neurons as the culprits in seizures, which can be characterized as debilitating "electrical storms" in the brain. However, recent research has shown that micro-glial cells may play a major role in seizures. Researchers have found that glial cells, which are supportive cells that also constitute a major part of the brain's immune system, cluster within areas in the brain when a severe brain injury has occurred. "When there has been serious damage to the brain, such as a head injury or infection, the immune system is activated and tries to counteract the damage and repair it," Barth said. "These glial cells migrate to the damaged area and release chemicals called cytokines that, unfortunately, also profoundly increase the excitability of the neurons that they are near. "In our new study, we showed for the first time that glial cells moving in and secreting these cytokines cause the neurons in the area to become excitable enough to cause seizures." The results of the study appeared in the journal Brain. Barth co-authored the paper with CU-Boulder professors of psychology and neuroscience Linda Watkins and Steven Maier, CU-Boulder graduate students Krista Rodgers and Alexis Northcutt and Professor Mark Hutchinson of the University of Adelaide in Australia. The National Institutes of Health funded the study. Acquired epilepsy is one of the few forms of epilepsy that has the potential for being prevented, because known head injuries are often followed by latent periods when changes in the brain lead to the development of chronic seizures. The findings are extremely promising, according to Barth, because if the brain's initial immunity reaction could be temporarily shut down, this could prevent the development of acquired epilepsy. "After a traumatic brain injury, there is often a period of several months where nothing seems to be happening," Barth said. "And then suddenly the person may start having seizures, which often develop into chronic epilepsy." What the research team believes is happening is that the initial immune response to the brain injury causes the first seizures. Then the adaptive immune system, which works on a longer-term basis, kicks in and makes structural changes in the brain, which could perpetuate epilepsy as a life-long condition, said Barth. Drugs are available on the market that suppress the immune system temporarily, Barth said. Even more promising are drugs currently under Food and Drug Administration trials for human use that cross the blood-brain barrier, which in simple terms means patients can take a pill which will effectively suppress the glial cells and stop them from reacting. "The thought is that maybe there is a window of opportunity where we could go in after an injury and administer one of these immune response inhibitors and stop a process that we think is going to lead to epilepsy," Barth said. "So instead of giving anti-seizure drugs, which have no effect in preventing or subsequently treating post-traumatic epilepsy, we could give some anti-immune drugs which may actually stop the process of developing epilepsy in the first place." The research team came to its conclusions through a series of experiments with rats in which they applied a bacteria called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, to the brain, activating the micro-glial cells. The glial cells very rapidly clustered around the area where the LPS was applied and created an immune reaction in that locale. The glial cells then released their cytokines, causing the neurons to become excitable enough to cause seizures. By directly applying other drugs that either blocked the activation of glial cells or the effect of cytokines on neurons, all signs of increased brain excitability and seizures were abolished, Barth said.
		Posted on August 3rd, 2010