Dogma and dreams: experimental lessons for epilepsy mechanism chasers.
Epilepsy mechanism chasers face one major difficulty. Since we don't know how the normal brain works, we can't start to understand how the diseased brain fails. Most of today's hypotheses are based on what we think about 'normal' brain function, which may lead to misconceptions, as will be developed here. Furthermore, since there are many different types of epilepsies, some mechanisms may only be relevant to some epilepsies. Here, I shall focus on temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) the most common form of partial epilepsy in adults. TLE is often drug resistant, as are 30-40% of all forms of epilepsies. The failure of drug-treatments most likely reflects our lack of knowledge of the underlying mechanisms.
Bernard
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INMED-INSERM U29, 163 Route de Luminy BP13, 13273 Marseille Cedex 09, France. cbernard@inmed.univ-mrs.fr
D000328:Adult; D004833:Epilepsy, Temporal Lobe / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000209:etiology / Q000503:physiopathology; D006801:Humans; D009433:Neural Inhibition; D009435:Synaptic Transmission; D005680:gamma-Aminobutyric Acid / Q000378:metabolism
D005680:gamma-Aminobutyric Acid