Cognitive Impairment Moderated by Working Memory in Pediatric Partial Epilepsy

描述(由申请人提供)：候选人的申请提供了必要的培训，以建立致力于确定癫痫认知共病的易感因素的临床研究生涯，这符合美国国立卫生研究院治疗癫痫的基准。候选人是一名临床儿科神经心理学家，他建议从一名神经学家首席联合导师、神经心理学家首席联合导师和高级核磁共振技术、发展认知神经科学、神经心理学和生物统计学方面的杰出专家导师和贡献者那里获得跨学科培训。这是一项对50名患有定位相关癫痫的儿童的横断面研究，他们将在年龄、性别和SES方面与健康对照组相匹配。复杂的神经科学方法将被用来研究言语工作记忆的功能和结构神经解剖学。工作记忆、语言和其他认知领域将通过进行神经心理测试进行检查，然后所有儿童都将参与功能和结构性神经成像任务。据推测，癫痫儿童在工作记忆方面会有特定的缺陷，并在激活的大脑区域的结构和功能上表现出更大的偏差。这些结果将对开发基于特定大脑的认知障碍的知情模型至关重要，以作为未来治疗的基础和衡量标准。这一培训将使应聘者能够利用神经成像和神经心理学的综合方法获得独特的跨学科培训。候选人也将处于有利地位，在她的职业生涯中将这种方法转变为其他神经发育障碍。 公共卫生相关性：癫痫儿童经常出现行为和认知方面的困难。困难的一个领域是执行功能，这是一套对有效执行任务很重要的技能。这项研究使用神经成像和神经心理学方法描述了癫痫儿童执行功能的一个方面，即工作记忆的神经网络。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The candidate's application provides the requisite training to establish a clinical research career committed to identify the susceptibility factors in the cognitive comorbidity of epilepsy which is in line with NIH Curing Epilepsy Benchmarks. The candidate is a clinical pediatric neuropsychologist who is proposing to obtain cross-disciplinary training from a neurologist lead co-mentor, neuropsychologist lead co-mentor and distinguished panel of expert mentors and contributors in advanced MRI techniques, developmental cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and biostatistics. This is a cross-sectional study of 50 children with localization related epilepsy who will be matched to healthy controls for age, gender, and SES. Sophisticated neuroscience methods will be used to investigate the functional and structural neuroanatomy of verbal working memory. Working memory, language, and other cognitive domains will be examined by conducting neuropsychological testing, and then all children will participate in functional and structural neuroimaging tasks. It is hypothesized that children with epilepsy will have specific weaknesses in working memory and show greater deviance in the structure and function of brain regions activated. These results will be crucial for developing an informed model of specific brain based cognitive impairments to base and measure future treatments against. This training will enable the candidate to obtain unique cross-disciplinary training using integrated neuroimaging and neuropsychology methods. The candidate will also be well-situated to transition this methodology into other neurodevelopmental disorders over the duration of her career. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Children with epilepsy often experience behavioral and cognitive difficulties. One area of difficulty is executive functioning which is a set of skills important for efficient task performance. This study characterizes the neural network of one aspect of executive functioning, namely working memory, in children with epilepsy using neuroimaging and neuropsychological measures.