Endogenous opiates: 1988

This paper is the eleventh installment in our annual review of the research during the past year involving the endogenous opiate system. It is concerned with nonanalgesic and behavioral studies of the opiate peptides that were published during 1988. The specific topics this year include stress; tolerance and dependence; eating; drinking; gastrointestinal, renal, and hepatic functions; mental illness; learning, memory, and reward; cardiovascular responses; respiration and thermoregulation; seizures and other neurological disorders; electrical activity; locomotor activity; sex, pregnancy, and development; immunology and cancer; and other behavior.     

Endogenous Opiates: 1996

Olson, G. A., R. D. Olson and A. J. Kastin. Endogenous opiates: 1996. Peptides 18(10) 1651–1688, 1997.—This paper is the nineteenth installment of our annual review of research concerning the opiate system. It summarizes papers published during 1996 reporting the behavioral effects of the opiate peptides and antagonists, excluding the purely analgesic effects, although stress-induced analgesia is included. The specific topics covered this year include stress, tolerance and dependence; eating; drinking; gastrointestinal, renal, and hepatic function; mental illness and mood; learning, memory, and reward; cardiovascular responses; respiration and thermoregulation; seizures and other neurological disorders; electrical-related activity; general activity and locomotion; sex, pregnancy, and development; immunological responses; and other behaviors.     

UKF-based closed loop iterative learning control of epileptiform wave in a neural mass model

A novel closed loop control framework is proposed to inhibit epileptiform wave in a neural mass model by external electric field, where the unscented Kalman filter method is used to reconstruct dynamics and estimate unmeasurable parameters of the model. Specifically speaking, the iterative learning control algorithm is introduced into the framework to optimize the control signal. In the proposed method, the control effect can be significantly improved based on the observation of the past attempts. Accordingly, the proposed method can effectively suppress the epileptiform wave as well as showing robustness to noises and uncertainties. Lastly, the simulation is carried out to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method. Besides, this work shows potential value to design model-based feedback controllers for epilepsy treatment.     

Overexpression of the Neurotrophic Cytokine S100β in Human Temporal Lobe Epilepsy

Abstract: Neuritic sprouting and disturbances of calcium homeostasis are well described in epilepsy. S100β is an astrocyte-derived cytokine that promotes neurite growth and induces increases in levels of intracellular calcium in neurons. In sections of neocortex of surgically resected temporal lobe tissue from patients with intractable epilepsy, we found that the number of S100β-immunoreactive astrocytes was approximately threefold higher than that found in control patients ( p < 0.001). These astrocytes were activated, i.e., enlarged, and had prominent processes. Temporal lobe tissue levels of S100β were shown by ELISA to be fivefold higher in 21 epileptics than in 12 controls ( p < 0.001). The expression of the astrocyte intermediate filament protein, glial fibrillary acidic protein, was not significantly elevated in epileptics, suggesting a selective up-regulation of S100β expression. Our findings, together with established functions of S100β, suggest that this neurotrophic cytokine may be involved in the pathophysiology of epilepsy.     

Automated detection and classification of high frequency oscillations (HFOs) in human intracereberal EEG

Discrete high-frequency oscillations (HFOs) in the range of 80–500 Hz have previously been recorded from human epileptic brains using intracereberal EEG and seem to be a reliable biomarker of seizure onset zone in patients with intractable epilepsy. Visual marking of HFOs bursts is tedious, highly time-consuming particularly for analyzing long-term multichannel EEG recordings, inevitably subjective and can be error prone. Thus, the development of automatic, fast and robust detectors is necessary and crucial for HFOs investigation and for propelling their eventual clinical applications. This paper presents a proposed algorithm for detection and classification of HFOs, which is a combination of both smoothed Hilbert Huang Transform (HHT) and root mean square (RMS) feature. Performance evaluation in terms of sensitivity and false discovery rate (FDR) were respectively 90.72% and 8.23% related to process validation. Indeed, the proposed method was efficient in terms of high sensitivity in which the majority of HFOs visually identified by experienced reviewers was correctly detected, and had a lower FDR. This would mean that only a low rate of detected events was misclassified as candidate HFOs events. The presented software is extremely fast, suitable and can be considered a valuable clinical tool for HFOs investigation.     

Endogenous opiates: 1983

This paper is the sixth in an annual series of reviews of research involving the endogenous opiates, each installment being restricted to work published during the previous year. Although the early articles in the series attempted to be comprehensive and cover the complete range of research with the opiate peptides, in the last two years we have limited our coverage to non-analgesic and behavioral work due to the enormous number of articles published in the field. The specific areas discussed here include stress, tolerance and dependence, consummatory responses, other gastrointestinal functions, interactions with alcohol, mental illness, learning and memory, cardiovascular responses, respiratory effects, thermoregulation, neurological disorders, activity, and miscellaneous other topics. As in previous years, we have attempted to present a relatively complete review of the subjects covered only for the previous year and generally have not tried to evaluate their contributions relative to those of past years.     

Endogenous opiates: 1989

This paper is the twelfth installment of our annual review of the research published during 1989 involving the behavioral, nonanalgesic, effects of the endogenous opiate peptides. The specific topics this year include stress; tolerance and dependence; eating; drinking; gastrointestinal and renal functions; mental illness; learning, memory, and reward; cardiovascular responses; respiration and thermoregulation; seizures and other neurological disorders; electrical-related activity; locomotor activity; sex, development, pregnancy, and aging; immunological responses; and other behavior.     

Antiepileptic and neuroprotective effects of human umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells in a pilocarpine-induced epilepsy model

Status epilepticus (SE) is a condition of persistent seizure that leads to brain damage and, frequently, to the establishment of chronic epilepsy. Cord blood is an important source of adult stem cells for the treatment of neurological disorders. The present study aimed to evaluate the effects of human umbilical cord blood mononuclear cells (HUCBC) transplanted into rats after induction of SE by the administration of lithium and pilocarpine chloride. Transplantation of HUCBC into epileptic rats protected against neuronal loss in the hippocampal subfields CA1, CA3 and in the hilus of the dentate gyrus, up to 300 days after SE induction. Moreover, transplanted rats had reduced frequency and duration of spontaneous recurrent seizures (SRS) 15, 120 and 300 days after the SE. Our study shows that HUCBC provide prominent antiepileptic and neuroprotective effects in the experimental model of epilepsy and reinforces that early interventions can protect the brain against the establishment of epilepsy.