Neuroyloy#1: Earthquakes and Epilepsy

Starting today, I’ll be posting interesting stuff related to my chosen specialty (Neurosciences) that I find on the net in a series I’ll call neuroyloy in aloyloy. This serves two purposes: 1. to promote Neuro as an alternative to boring old residency programs (calling all medical interns out there still deciding where to go after the Boards… join us in Neuro na lang!); and 2. to prevent this blog from CODING (ie, flat-line) while I am in first year (ie, while I am the slave of all slaves in the department, at the bottom of the totem pole, jingle lang ang pahinga). So, even when I’m too busy with hospital work or too tired to post, you, dear loyal readers (yes, the 3 or 4 of you) will have something to aloyloy about.

The first of this series is a very interesting article from The Guardian about what I think is one of the most complex diseases known to man, epilepsy. I remember that there were many instances in the past when, while I was in Church, or at a dine-in, or even while I was lounging at the beach (yes! true story!), a PWE (Person-with-Epilepsy) near me suddenly seized. All these events I took to mean that I really belong to Neuro. Here’s the article, pasted without permission from The Guardian’s website (I cite Fair Use):

Earthquakes may hold clues for treatment of epilepsy
Alok Jha, science correspondent
The Guardian, Thursday January 10 2008

Earthquake-prediction techniques could help develop a way to forecast epileptic seizures, according to research which found striking similarities between the electrical activity in the brain before and during seizures and seismological data around earthquakes.

Both are usually preceded by small, barely detectable tremors and, as with an earthquake, the longer it has been since a seizure, the longer it will be until the next one. According to scientists, these shared features mean that the patterns are not random and could even be governed by similar mathematical rules.

Epilepsy comprises a set of conditions which disrupt the electrical activity in the brain and the main symptoms are recurrent, unprovoked seizures. It is one of the most common long-term neurological disorders, affecting 456,000 people in the UK and around 50 million worldwide.

The condition can often be controlled by drugs that damp down the brain’s electrical activity, although surgery to remove the affected part of the brain is sometimes used in the most hard-to-treat cases.

Seizures often start suddenly in a region of the brain and can then spread to engulf the organ. An earthquake also appears as a sudden, potentially damaging vibration focused around a relatively well-defined point. The researchers said both seizures and earthquakes could be thought of as “relaxation events”, in which accumulated energy is suddenly dissipated.

In their study researchers led by neurologist Ivan Osorio from the University of Kansas showed the frequency of both earthquakes and epileptic seizures could be described by “power laws”, which can often explain the frequency of events that, on the surface, seem random. In earthquake prediction power laws link the size of an individual quake with the time that passes between quakes of that size.

Osorio suggested that the similarities between electrical activity in the brain and seismic activity could bring prediction and prevention of seizures a step closer. “This suggests a novel research direction for the prediction of seizures based on the notion that seizures beget seizures,” he wrote in a paper uploaded to the Arxiv website, where scientists swap research findings before they undergo peer-review.

Matthew Walker of the experimental epilepsy group at University College London told New Scientist magazine that the research was an “attractive concept”, adding that “a good predictive method could revolutionise people’s lives”. But he cautioned that the Kansas team had yet to show that its method worked in practice.