Cognitive Impairment Moderated by Working Memory in Pediatric Partial Epilepsy

描述（由申请人提供）：申请人的申请为建立临床研究生涯提供了必要的培训，致力于确定癫痫认知共病的易感性因素，这符合NIH治疗癫痫基准。该候选人是一名临床儿科神经心理学家，拟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以及高级MRI技术、发展认知神经科学、神经心理学和生物统计学领域的杰出专家导师和贡献者那里获得跨学科培训。这是一项横断面研究，研究对象是50名患有定位相关性癫痫的儿童，他们将与年龄、性别和社会经济地位相匹配的健康对照。复杂的神经科学方法将用于研究语言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神经心理学测试进行检查，然后所有儿童将参与功能和结构神经成像任务。据推测，患有癫痫的儿童在工作记忆方面有特定的弱点，并且在激活的大脑区域的结构和功能上表现出更大的偏差。这些结果对于开发一个基于特定大脑认知障碍的知情模型至关重要，从而为未来的治疗提供基础和衡量。该培训将使候选人获得独特的跨学科培训，使用综合神经影像学和神经心理学方法。在她的职业生涯中，候选人也将很好地将这种方法转化为其他神经发育障碍。

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.