People with well-controlled epilepsy often experience bouts of unclear thinking, perception and memory challenges. In a new study, Stanford researchers demonstrated why this occurs.
Such cognitive lapses are caused by a “pathological buzz” of electrical brain activity that interferes with the brain’s normal activity, reported Josef Parvizi, M.D., Ph.D., director of Stanford’s Program for Intractable Epilepsy. These buzzes occur multiple times each minute in epileptic brain tissue, even in people whose seizures are well controlled.
Investigators showed how this activity affected six patients with epilepsy who had therapeutic brain implants. Using data from the implants during cognitive tests, the researchers pinpointed the precise moment when errant electrical activity affected behavior. At those times, the participants were less able to accurately perform simple cognitive tasks. They also had slower response times and reported less confidence in the accuracy of their responses.
Improved medications or implantable devices could help alleviate these cognitive deficits, wrote Parvizi and colleagues. The study findings may also help clinicians better distinguish between healthy and diseased areas in epileptic brains, they concluded.
Epileptic seizures are common in dementia. Up to 22% of people with Alzheimer’s have had at least one seizure, according to one commonly cited study.
The findings were published on Oct. 16 in Science Translational Medicine.
