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Treatment Options for Children with Epilepsy

Epilepsy Epilepsy Treatment

New Insights Into Mechanisms of Pediatric Epilepsy

Summary & Participants

A child's brain is different from an adult's, of course. But now researchers are finding how these differences can lead to improved epilepsy treatment of kids.

Medically Reviewed On: July 05, 2008

Webcast Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Epilepsy is defined as the condition of chronic, recurrent, unprovoked seizures, and affects approximately 2.5 million people in the United States. Epilepsy is caused by synchronous electrical discharges in the brain and can affect both children and adults. While it was once thought that the brain of a child was a small version of an adult brain, researchers and physicians are beginning to think differently.

FRANCES JENSEN, MD: We understand that the circuitry is quite different in the immature brain compared to the adult, and actually gives rise to different forms of epilepsy.

It's very likely they're going to require different treatments. Much of pediatric epilepsy right now is still using drugs that were developed for adults and not children. Very few drugs have actually been developed specifically for children and there is a large move in the field to try to get pediatric indications for drugs right from the early stages of development for this population.

We are looking into how drugs that were developed for adults actually can be used in more specific manners, at different doses perhaps, and in different combinations for pediatric indications. But, more importantly, very exciting research is coming up regarding new drugs that actually come to new targets that are only present in the immature brain.

ANNOUNCER: Some of that new research involves certain types of receptors and neurotransmitters in the brain, referred to as the AMPA receptor system.

FRANCES JENSEN, MD: Receptors are places on the neuron where neurons talk to each other and can signal from one another. And there are very different neurotransmitters being used in the immature brain and different receptors for those transmitters.

And one of them is this AMPA receptor system, which seems to be at least moderately up-regulated in the first few years of life, compared to the adult. And, because it up-regulates specifically in this window of development, we wonder and have hypothesized whether these receptors might play a special role in some of the more refractory seizures such as neonatal seizures.

We hope to look at existing drugs that are currently being used in other venues inside epilepsy and outside epilepsy that might act on these receptors and we also are looking into developing new drugs that can work at these receptors as possible new therapeutic agents for age-specific neonatal seizure treatment.

My laboratory has looked at this receptor and has found that actually there are some very successful suppressant effects of some of these AMPA receptors antagonists.

ANNOUNCER: Other research is attempting to identify new therapeutic targets for anti-seizure treatments.

FRANCES JENSEN, MD: We're learning a lot about what regulates excitability of neurons and it turns out that neurons dramatically change over the first year of life and even through adolescence.

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