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Friday, February 28, 2025

Your Dai­ly Health

Brain implant 'predicts' epilepsy seizures

by

20130505

A brain im­plant may be able to pre­dict epilep­sy seizures by pick­ing up the ear­ly warn­ing signs, a small study sug­gests.

The de­vice us­es the brain's elec­tri­cal ac­tiv­i­ty to tell pa­tients if their risk of a seizure is high, mod­er­ate or low.

The study on 15 peo­ple, pub­lished in the Lancet Neu­rol­o­gy, showed the de­vice worked in some pa­tients.

The char­i­ty Epilep­sy Ac­tion cau­tioned that it was still ear­ly days, but said it could be an "ex­cit­ing de­vel­op­ment."

Epilep­sy is thought to af­fect 50 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide. Ab­nor­mal ac­tiv­i­ty in part of the brain caus­es seizures in­volv­ing in­vol­un­tary shak­ing.

Sig­nals were col­lect­ed from the sur­face of the brain and sent down wires to an­oth­er im­plant in the chest. This beamed the da­ta to a hand-held de­vice which worked out the odds of a seizure.

The tri­al was run at three hos­pi­tals in Aus­tralia and was fund­ed by the man­u­fac­tur­ers Neu­ro­Vista.

The re­sults were mixed. For the first four months the brain was mon­i­tored so the sys­tem could learn a pa­tient's brain­waves be­fore a seizure.

On­ly eight pa­tients then pro­gressed to the stage where the de­vice was ful­ly ac­ti­vat­ed and they were con­stant­ly in­formed of their chance of a seizure. It was be­tween 56 per cent and 100 per cent ef­fec­tive in those pa­tients.

Prof Mark Cook, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mel­bourne, said if the tech­nol­o­gy could be proven if could help re­move the un­pre­dictable na­ture of epilep­sy.

He told the BBC: "Be­ing able to pre­dict the events with many min­utes or hours lead time could have sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on in­de­pen­dence.

"This could change the way the ill­ness is treat­ed. For in­stance, our cur­rent strat­e­gy of giv­ing med­ica­tions con­tin­u­ous­ly be­cause of the un­pre­dictable oc­cur­rence of events could al­ter the types of med­ica­tions be­ing de­vel­oped.

"Short-act­ing ther­a­pies may prove to be ef­fec­tive with­out sub­ject­ing pa­tients to the long-term prob­lems that cur­rent­ly avail­able ther­a­pies may cause."

Com­ment­ing on the find­ings, Chris­t­ian El­ger and Flo­ri­an Mor­mann, from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bonn med­ical cen­tre, de­scribed the re­sults as "a ma­jor mile­stone... show­ing for the first time, to our knowl­edge that prospec­tive seizure pre­dic­tion is pos­si­ble".

They added: "Whether this per­for­mance is al­so suf­fi­cient for clin­i­cal ap­pli­ca­tions is un­clear, this will de­pend on how well pa­tients tol­er­ate false alarms or missed seizures."

Si­mon Wig­glesworth, deputy chief ex­ec­u­tive of Epilep­sy Ac­tion, said more re­search was need­ed, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the "small sam­ple size and the in­con­sis­ten­cies in the da­ta col­lect­ed."

"If a per­son is able to be alert­ed when they are about to have a seizure, this could help them to take steps to make sure they are safe dur­ing the seizure. The de­vice could al­so be a use­ful tool for car­ers of peo­ple with epilep­sy," he said.

"Pre­dict­ing seizures may help us to un­der­stand more about the ways seizures can be man­aged and ul­ti­mate­ly pre­vent­ed." (BBC)

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