Media Citations
Epileptic Seizures Could Be Predictable

February 20, 2001

By REUTERS

Filed at 7:08 p.m. ET

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters Health) - Studies in patients with severe
epilepsy suggest that a seizure begins long before its symptoms
become apparent. The signs of an impending seizure can be picked up
on an electroencephalogram (EEG) anywhere from 10 minutes to hours
before the seizure becomes obvious.

Now scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science here say that a computational
analysis of such EEG changes can be used to predict seizures. They
also found that analysis of brain waveforms could aid the
identification of the seizure source and so guide excision of brain
tissue in those patients who are candidates for surgery.

In five patients with epilepsy so severe that they were candidates
for surgical treatment, epileptic seizures could be reliably
predicted from 20 minutes to 43 minutes before the event using this
system, said Dr. Leon D. Iasemidis of Arizona State University in
Tempe.

``If you could predict a seizure, you could take a drug or not
drive a car, maybe have a seizure that is much less severe,'' noted
Dr. Panos M. Pardalos, a research team member from the University
of Florida in Gainesville.

The prediction system is based on continuous EEG recordings
obtained from the patients over a 10-day period. This massive
dataset was then analyzed using mathematical concepts used to find
the best solution to problems in which chaos occurs.

This modeling approach is appropriate because epileptic brains are
chaotic systems that repeatedly shift into the seizure state of
chaos from the normal state of order, Iasemidis said.

In analyzing their data, the scientists found that seizures are
preceded by a gradual change in widespread regions of the brain, as
more and more of the EEG recordings begin to show abnormality. They
then identified specific changes that are characteristic of this
process and that have usefulness is predicting a seizure.

The scientists' findings in patients with epilepsy will be reported
in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Combinatorial Optimization.

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Last Update: October 09, 2002. Bruno Chiarini