title: Following a potential epileptogenic insult, prolonged high rates of nonlinear dynamical regimes of intermittency type is the hallmark of epileptogenesis.
abstract: The lack of a marker of epileptogenesis is an unmet medical need, not only from the clinical perspective but also from the point of view of the pre-clinical research. Indeed, the lack of this kind of marker affects the investigations on the mechanisms of epileptogenesis as well as the development of novel therapeutic approaches aimed to prevent or to mitigate the severity of the incoming epilepsy in humans. In this work, we provide evidence that in an experimental model of epileptogenesis that mimics the alteration of the blood-brain barrier permeability, a key-mechanism that contributes to the development of epilepsy in humans and in animals, the prolonged occurrence in the electrocorticograms (ECoG) of high rates of a nonlinear dynamical regimes known as intermittency univocally characterizes the population of experimental animals which develop epilepsy, hence it can be considered as the first biophysical marker of epileptogenesis.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neuroscience, IRCCS - Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, Via G. La Masa 19, 20156 Milan, Italy.
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rizzi
authors.affiliation: Departments of Physiology and Cell Biology, Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
authors.forename: Itai
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Weissberg
authors.affiliation: Departments of Physiology and Cell Biology, Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.
authors.forename: Dan Z
authors.initials: DZ
authors.lastname: Milikovsky
authors.affiliation: Departments of Physiology and Cell Biology, Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel.|Department of Medical Neuroscience, Faculty of Medicine, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2, Canada.
authors.forename: Alon
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Friedman
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D015415:Biomarkers / Q000378:metabolism; D001812:Blood-Brain Barrier / Q000473:pathology; D004195:Disease Models, Animal; D000069280:Electrocorticography / Q000379:methods; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000378:metabolism / Q000473:pathology*; D051379:Mice; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D010539:Permeability
chemical_list: D015415:Biomarkers