International Physician Update

 Looking through the Keyhole

Jehuda Sepkuty focuses on synapse biology to find out more about common seizures.

 Finding one single cause of epilepsy would be amazing,” says Hopkins neurologist
Jehuda Sepkuty, M.D., considering how many ways the brain’s fine balance—its seesaw between excitation and inhibition—can be tipped to produce a seizure.

But, by focusing purely on synapse biology, Sepkuty and his team are at least
shedding light on the most common seizures: those that begin in the brain’s hippocampus.

They’ve created a basic flaw—in rats—that may help explain temporal lobe epilepsy.  The rats were engineered to lack a specific molecule—the EAAC1 transporter—that ferries excess neurotransmitter—in this case, glutamate—out of synapses and
back into nerve cells. But for these rats, neurodegeneration wasn’t their problem. “Let’s see if they’re having seizures,” Sepkuty proposed.

He started recording rat EEGs.  And it soon became clear that rat staring correlates with spiking. “It’s similar to partial complex seizures in our  patients, the sort that result in staring and confusion.”

Sepkuty found that the fewer the transporter molecules in rats’ neurons, the more frequent their seizures.