[HN Gopher] Brain waves usually found in sleep can protect again...
___________________________________________________________________
Brain waves usually found in sleep can protect against epileptic
activity
Author : wglb
Score : 97 points
Date : 2023-12-01 20:31 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medicalxpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicalxpress.com)
| padolsey wrote:
| Quite interesting. So epileptic brains are re-using a mechanism
| from the sleep cycle to defend against daytime seizures
| [potentially].... But at a cost of cognitive ability. I like how
| the brain can adaptively rewire stuff to defend itself. Just an
| anecdote, I find that my epilepsy causes me to drastically fall
| off a cognitive cliff at a certain point during e.g. a long
| meeting, and I guess this is a kind of gentle defence mechanism
| which I tend to call an 'aura' or precursor to a seizure. I like
| that the brain can give you notice of such a thing, enabling you
| to escape a bad situation.
| jonmagic wrote:
| "aura" rings very true for me, I can feel it coming on 5-30
| seconds before it hits hard.
|
| I especially struggle, not necessarily to the point of seizure
| but at least increased brain activity, with social situations
| with too many inputs when I can't decide which input to focus
| on.
| zackkatz wrote:
| I had nocturnal childhood epilepsy and, thankfully, I grew
| out of it.
|
| I would have an "aura" before going to bed that I would be
| having a seizure that night.
|
| Thankfully, I never had a daytime seizure.
| falling_myshkin wrote:
| i have the same troubles in social situations with too many
| inputs. i am quite frankly asocial because of it, though i
| don't necessarily want to be. do you mind if i ask what your
| reaction feels like? my reaction feels a lot like
| dissociation, but it also could be absence seizure. it is
| hard to introspect in those moments.
| falling_myshkin wrote:
| i recently had my first generalized seizure and once i knew and
| talked with doctors who confirmed it as primarily TLE i
| realized i had been having focal seizures for years.
|
| i think i may have a similar feeling in long
| meetings/conversations too. it's like i am forced to stop
| paying attention for several seconds. i can generally even
| notice that i am not paying attention, but I am unable to focus
| even if i try. i think i've noticed it tends to be worse if
| there are lots of people talking. it feels a lot like
| dissociation. perhaps it is an 'aura', some sort of absence
| seizure...
| voidpointercast wrote:
| Anecdotal but I have epilepsy and my memory has started
| decreasing since I started having seizures. Even now thoroughly
| medicated, I'll still have moments where I completely lose my
| train of thought, and have to rethink how I arrived there.
| jonmagic wrote:
| I've wondered if the memory issues are actually side effects of
| the medication. I spent 6 months on max dosage of one
| medication and memory was crap and ability to communicate with
| humans (vs computers for the day job) was greatly diminished.
| I'm now down to about half the dosage of that medication but
| we've added a small dose of a second medication and I'm
| remembering more and social interactions aren't as stressful as
| they were.
| voidpointercast wrote:
| I'm not on a ton of medication, but it's very possible. The
| drugs they put you on are varying kinds of brutal.
| ddorian43 wrote:
| What about "difficulty recalling words"?
| falling_myshkin wrote:
| not parent but as someone with temporal lobe epilepsy, in
| addition to what parent describes, difficulty recalling words
| is definitely something i experience. Probably the most
| annoying thing that i have had to learn to deal with is
| people trying to fill in or guess what word i am trying to
| say while i pause. The hippocampus is located in the temporal
| lobe and is heavily involved in the processing and storage of
| short-term memory as well as retrieval of long-term memory,
| so it makes sense that if the hippocampus is a bit fried from
| seizures it would manifest as memory-related cognitive
| issues.
| breck wrote:
| I'm curious if the ketogenic diet is regularly presented as a
| treatment option to those with epilepsy or is it primarily
| meds?
| falling_myshkin wrote:
| Primarily medication. Fasting has a long (ancient) history as
| a treatment for epilepsy, the modern revival and
| investigation of the ketogenic diet specifically relates to
| certain types drug-resistant childhood epilepsy. The
| Wikipedia article on the ketogenic diet is quite informative.
| theK wrote:
| Amazing how the brain itself has already countermeasures to deal
| with certain epileptic activity on its own.
|
| What I am missing from the article is whether this provides some
| tangible opportunities for developing treatments or whether it is
| a finding that is more like a trivia, as in "hey look how cool
| the brain is!"
| falling_myshkin wrote:
| maybe neurofeedback?
| https://web.archive.org/web/20110710194522/www.epilepsyhealt...
|
| wikipedia claims there is not much recent research when it
| references that link.
|
| it is being shown that meditation can affect brain waves, I
| wonder if it is in a way that is beneficial for preventing
| seizures.
| s_Hogg wrote:
| I'm one of the lucky ones, as I grew out of my teenage years my
| brain changed and seizures stopped. You never stop looking over
| your should or thinking about it though, not at all.
|
| One theory a doctor posed to me for why this could be happening
| (he'd seen it before), was simply down to neural pathways getting
| more set as you get older - the analogy he used was that a
| seizure is sort of like your brain short circuiting, so if it's
| less plastic that may make you less prone.
|
| It's just ridiculous how adaptable the human brain is, I love
| reading about this stuff.
| mFixman wrote:
| I'm lucky to never have had seizures but I had a constant
| muscular ticks when I was a teenager that mostly went away as I
| became an adult.
|
| My experience is consistent with your theory of neural pathways
| getting set, with the exception that I still have get
| repetitive head ticks on multi-day periods of high anxiety. I
| completely believe that better and more consistent sleep as an
| adult (outside high-anxiety periods) also has a lot to do with
| it.
| imetatroll wrote:
| I have weird muscular ticks or tremors that are sudden and
| then stop generally over and over again in the same muscles -
| either the bicept or the calf - at times. I haven't figured
| out if it is related to stress or lack of sleep both of which
| I struggle with but I can say that it is pretty annoying.
| Sometimes I wonder if it is foreshadowing for something much
| less pleasant in the future.
| SunlightEdge wrote:
| On a separate but related topic, I have heard that meditation can
| trigger/worsen epilepsy, but there is also counter evidence that
| it can reduce seizures. I find this link interesting - even if
| there is no definitive finding yet. Note: there are different
| types of meditation.
| xeRTRex wrote:
| Sort of related, but my epileptic dog has most of his seizures
| right as he's waking up. Perhaps he's suddenly losing his
| "protection" as his short waves are disabling.
| amatecha wrote:
| Interesting, I have heard recently of someone who is most
| likely to have his seizures when he's waking up. I know little
| about the subject but now I wonder about the mechanisms that
| make this more likely...
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| I think there's more to dig into here. Although it's fairly
| well known that sleep (and lack of it) can trigger seizures
| on waking, there's not much understanding of why. Recently a
| big breakthrough in SUDI research ("cot death"/"SIDS") found
| low levels of BChE was a marker for unexplained infant
| deaths. This is significant particularly because the same
| marker is known to be linked to difficulties waking up from
| anaesthesia.
|
| There is a very similar syndrome known as SUDEP (or Sudden
| Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), where often people are found
| dead, face down in their beds.
|
| It seems to me at least plausible that there are some links
| between this new discovery, SUDEP, and SUDI/SIDS.
| heyoni wrote:
| Interesting. I believe those might be called silence seizures
| and if I'm not mistaken are prone to happen around the sleep
| cycles, so before or after one and are found at a fairly high
| rate in people with a Satb2 mutation, a gene known to be
| heavily involved in bone growth and cerebral cortex
| development.
| pedalpete wrote:
| Super interesting. We've been working on slow-wave enhancement
| over the last 3 years (increasing synchronous firing of neurons
| which are the slow-waves mentioned in the article).
|
| We've only looked at doing this during sleep. I'll reach out to
| epilepsy researchers to see if there may be any benefit to our
| work in this space.
|
| Or if anyone here knows more, please reach out. Email in profile.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-03 23:02 UTC)