From the fly to the man, although very different don’t worry, epileptic seizures follow the same mathematical rules. An additional concept to understand this neuronal activity. This is what the Inserm laboratory at the Timone hospital in Marseille found in a study published in the journal Brain.
epilepsy is a neural activity, which is characterized by discharges of abnormal nerve impulses in the whole brain or in a specific area. It is encoded in any healthy brain, but only expresses itself in pathological situations. In short, we are all likely to do so, but following a head trauma or electroshock, for example. During their study and after 2 years of work, researchers were able to classify 16 distinct types and found that precise mathematical rules describe how a crisis starts and how it ends.
Reorient the therapeutic research of new drugs
This advance will make it possible to redirect therapeutic research from new drugs. The researchers are already considering applications of their conclusions: “we are going to use these bricks of epilepsy models, put them in the patient’s brain, in particular from MRIs and try to understand how the crisis is born and spreads” says Professor Fabrice Bartolomeï, head of the neurophysiology and epileptology department at the Timone hospital.
Epilepsy affects 1% of the world’s population, it is the most common neurological infection after migraine. A chronic and debilitating disease, its most severe forms result in convulsions or loss of consciousness and have significant social consequences: ban on driving, working or playing sports.
