Seizure Prevention via Control of Neuronal Activity

癫痫是一种非常常见和严重的疾病。目前，约有三分之一的癫痫患者尽管接受了现有的最佳片剂治疗，但仍会出现癫痫发作。少数人可以通过切除癫痫发作的大脑部分来成功治疗，但对大多数癫痫患者来说，这不是一种选择。这意味着我们迫切需要全新的癫痫治疗方法。其他类型的脑部疾病（如帕金森氏症）可以通过大脑电刺激非常成功地治疗。这包括在帕金森病中出现问题的大脑关键部位插入微小的电线。然后使用电流来改变大脑这些部分的工作方式，这已被证明是一种非常成功的治疗方法。在癫痫患者的大脑中，癫痫发作只是在某些时候出现，其余时间大脑活动正常。这意味着我们需要找到一种治疗方法，既能让大脑保持正常状态，又能在癫痫发作时将其引导回正常状态。在这个提议中，我们的目标是开发一种技术来持续测量大脑是处于稳定的正常状态还是正在转向癫痫发作，并向大脑的关键部位传递电刺激以保持事物稳定并阻止癫痫发作。电刺激会一直变化，这取决于同时测量的结果。我们将使用三种并行的方法来开发这个系统。首先，我们将使用计算机预测来找出这种方法可能奏效的方法。然后我们将在实验系统中试验这些方法。与此同时，我们将从一些患者那里收集信息，看看我们的想法是否可能在癫痫患者身上起作用。

Epilepsy is a very common and serious disease. At the moment, about one third of people with epilepsy continue to have seizures despite taking the best tablet treatment available. A few can be treated successfully by removing part of the brain where seizures start, but for most people with epilepsy this is not an option. This means that we urgently need completely new treatments for epilepsy.Other kinds of brain disease (such as Parkinson s disease) can be very successfully treated using electrical stimulation of the brain. This involves inserting tiny wires into critical parts of the brain that go wrong in Parkinson s disease. Electrical current is then used to change the way these parts of the brain work, which has proved a highly successful treatment.In the brains of people with epilepsy, seizures arise only some of the time, and the rest of the time the brain is behaving normally. This means that we need to find a treatment approach that can keep the brain in the normal state and steer it back towards the normal state if it begins to drift towards a seizure. In this proposal, we aim to develop a technique to constantly measure whether the brain is in a stable normal state or is dirfting towards a seizure, and to deliver electrical stimulation to critical parts of the brain to keep things stable and stop seizures from arising. The electrical stimulation will change all the time depending on what the simultaneous measurement is telling us.We will develop this system using three parallel approaches. First of all, we will use computer predictions to work out likely ways this approach might work. We will then try out these methods in an expreimntal system. Alongside this, we will collect information from some of our patients to see if our ideas are likely to work in people with epilepsy.