Possible biomarkers discovered for epilepsy


Wednesday, 22 March, 2023

Possible biomarkers discovered for epilepsy

Researchers from Lund University have discovered higher levels of immune proteins in the blood before and after an epileptic seizure. These possible biomarkers can be identified using a simple blood test, and could result in better diagnostic methods as soon as medical care is sought after a suspected seizure. The breakthrough has been described in the journal Heliyon.

Epilepsy is the collective name for abnormal activity in the brain that causes temporary loss of control of behaviour and movement. The condition can be congenital or be caused by a tumour, stroke or infection in the brain, and can cause very different symptoms depending on which part of the brain the episode begins in or spreads to.

Study leader Christine Ekdahl-Clementson and her team compared epileptic seizures with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures — a psychiatric diagnosis that manifests itself through clinical symptoms that can easily be mistaken for epilepsy and as a result is often mistakenly treated with epilepsy medication. There is therefore a great need to be able to distinguish between the conditions more easily.

“The investigation to establish whether someone is suffering from epilepsy or is affected by psychogenic seizures is resource-intensive,” said research team member Marie Taylor. “It may require the patient to be admitted to hospital for several days with constant video and EEG surveillance, with medical staff on hand around the clock.”

Knowing that inflammation processes that start as an immune response in the body can provoke a seizure, the researchers started to look for possible biomarkers for epilepsy within the immune system. They discovered that levels of five inflammation markers — proteins — were elevated acutely in people who had experienced an epileptic seizure.

“We call these markers ‘fingerprints’ since they involve several inflammation-related proteins with different reaction patterns,” Taylor said. “The patients who had epilepsy showed raised levels of one of the five proteins — IL-6 — even before their seizures, a value that transiently raised even further directly after the seizure.”

Among patients with psychogenic seizures, there was no change in the biomarkers. This might mean that a simple blood test on a patient arriving at A&E after a seizure can show whether the immunological response is elevated. If it is not, there is a greater chance that it is a matter of a psychogenic seizure, which provides a first indication of how the patient should be further assessed.

“The next stage is to repeat our studies on a broader and less homogenous patient group, where we investigate the ‘fingerprint’ in adults with epilepsy,” Ekdahl-Clementson said. “We also want to see whether the biomarkers respond in the same way in children, where the causes of epilepsy are more often genetic. We are doing this through an ongoing study in Lund, in collaboration with child and adolescent psychiatry as well as paediatric neurology.”

Image credit: iStock.com/Sewcream

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