Seizure Prevention via Control of Neuronal Activity

癫痫是一种非常常见和严重的疾病。目前，尽管服用了最好的片剂治疗，约三分之一的癫痫患者仍有癫痫发作。少数患者可以通过切除癫痫发作开始的大脑部分来成功治疗，但对于大多数癫痫患者来说，这不是一个选择。这意味着我们迫切需要全新的治疗癫痫的方法。其他种类的脑部疾病(如帕金森-S病)可以通过电刺激大脑来非常成功地治疗。这涉及到将微小的电线插入帕金森-S病患者大脑的关键部位。然后，电流被用来改变大脑这些部分的工作方式，这被证明是一种非常成功的治疗方法。在癫痫患者的大脑中，癫痫发作只在部分时间发生，其余时间大脑行为正常。这意味着我们需要找到一种治疗方法，使大脑保持正常状态，并在大脑开始漂移到癫痫发作时引导它回到正常状态。在这项提议中，我们的目标是开发一种技术，不断测量大脑是否处于稳定的正常状态或正在走向癫痫，并向大脑的关键部位提供电刺激，以保持事物的稳定，阻止癫痫的发生。电刺激将根据同步测量告诉我们的信息而一直发生变化。我们将使用三种并行方法开发这一系统。首先，我们将使用计算机预测来找出这种方法可能起作用的方式。然后，我们将在实验系统中试验这些方法。除此之外，我们还将从我们的一些患者那里收集信息，看看我们的想法是否可能适用于癫痫患者。

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.