Brief Summary: In this project EEG recordings between healthy participants and those with a diagnosed Absence-epilepsy will be compared. The investigators suggest differences in EEG microstate analysis and neuropsychological parameters related to interictal cognitive impairment in these patients. This projects goal is to derive an EEG-based measure of conscious awareness.
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Brief Summary: SMART is a program for adult individuals with sub-optimally controlled epilepsy. It involves educational and behavioral interventions intended to enhance epilepsy self-management. The initial group session is in-person where individuals receive curriculum materials and learn to utilize the Web format (such as Adobe Connect or ZOOM) and a teleconferencing service needed to access the remainder of the group sessions. These sessions are held over an 8 week time period and are co-lead by a trained nurse educator and a trained peer educator. The peer educator is someone with epilepsy and a history of NHEs. Educators use a written curriculum delivered online, and the interactive sessions last 60-90 minutes. Groups are limited to about 6 -12 adult participants. After the group sessions are done, individuals have 8 telephone maintenance sessions with the nurse educator and the peer educator spaced approximately 2 weeks apart. SMART is intended for adults with epilepsy, especially those who belong to disadvantaged sub groups such as rural populations, veterans with epilepsy and those who are underinsured. People with epilepsy who belong to disadvantaged sub-groups are more likely to have poor outcomes and often end up using expensive crisis-oriented care, and thus potentially might benefit the most from self-management programs if they can be actively engaged.
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Brief Summary: Drug-resistant focal epilepsy (DRFE) is frequently associated with complications of varying severity that impair patient's quality of life. Among these complications, cognitive disturbances and especially episodic memory difficulties, play a determinant part. Episodic memory can be defined as a function that allows the mental reconstruction of a past life episode, through complex associative mechanisms that link the vivid experience to its context of occurrence, called encoding context. It is a dynamic cognitive function, which calls on a widely distributed cerebral network, mainly involving the medial temporal lobe, particularly the hippocampus. Epilepsy could have a specific impact on this crucial network, disrupting the binding mechanisms between the experienced events and their encoding context, which are essential for efficient memory. Although patients with DRFE frequently demonstrate memory impairment as assessed by standardised neuropsychological tests, it only imperfectly reflects their difficulties. As a matter of fact, despite a subjective memory complaint, about 20% have no memory impairment on these tests, resulting from a phenomenon called accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF). ALF is indeed characterised by normal performance on standardised neuropsychological tests involving retention delays of 20-30 minutes, but disabling memory complaint and abnormally marked forgetting within hours or days that follow the learning period. This phenomenon is widely described at the conceptual level, but remains difficult to measure in daily practice, at least partly due to methodological limits. Thus, the validated tools available in clinical routine are poorly adapted to the complexity and the associative dimension of memory networks. There is therefore a clinical need for a specific assessment tool that would be able to detect ALF, in order to better quantify it and to enable the appropriate care of patients suffering from DRFE. The aim of the EPIMNESIE study is to evaluate the diagnostic capacity of a behavioural associative memory task, based on the analysis of encoding and consolidation mechanisms, in order to measure ALF. In this prospective study, 40 patients with DRFE and 40 healthy subjects will be proposed to complete a new associative memory task involving a learning phase and two recall sessions which will take place at 30 minutes and 72 hours after the learning phase.
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Brief Summary: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is one of the neuromodulation techniques that can be indicated in patients suffering from refractory epilepsies, especially when an open resection has failed or is not indicated, and vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) demonstrated no efficacy. Benefits such as reduction of seizure frequency have been shown for thalamic stimulation of the anterior thalamic nucleus (ANT), however it has limited efficacy and non-optimal neurocognitive outcome, making the search for other targets crucial in this context. We propose a novel target for DBS stimulation in drug-resistant epilepsy namely the medial pulvinar thalamic nucleus (PuM). This target has been chosen based on previous retrospective studies demonstrating that PuM is involved during focal seizures and in loss of consciousness and seizure termination. PuM stimulation also showed potential encouraging results based on the feasibility and safetu studies recently published. The main objective is to obtain a significant percentage of seizure reduction after 12 months of PuM stimulation compared to baseline period. Quality of life and the relationship with psychiatric and cognitive comorbidities will also be assessed.
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Brief Summary: multi-central and prospectively study the diagnostic value of autoimmune antibody detection in new and chronic epilepsy, and provide reference for clinical practice
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Brief Summary: The XEN1101 Phase 2 clinical trial is a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study that will evaluate the clinical efficacy, safety and tolerability of increasing doses of XEN1101 administered as adjunctive treatment in adult patients diagnosed with focal epilepsy, followed by an optional open-label extension (OLE).
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Brief Summary: The purpose of this study is to evaluate standard of care exercise education alone or in combination with a wearable physical activity tracker in people with epilepsy (PWE) to determine the most effective way to increase physical activity and measure impact on depression, anxiety, quality of life, sleep, and seizure frequency.
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Brief Summary: PREDICT is an observational study following adults with an unprovoked seizure or epilepsy in the health care region of western Sweden. The objective is to identify biomarkers and/or genetic predisposition of relevance for diagnosis and/or treatment of epilepsy and study the long-term prognosis and consequences of epilepsy.
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Brief Summary: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the pharmacokinetics (PK) of perampanel during the Maintenance Period of the Core Study following oral suspension administration given as an adjunctive therapy in pediatric participants from 1 month to less than 4 years of age with epilepsy.
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Brief Summary: This project aims to conduct a pilot study based on the targeting of the epileptogenic zone previously localized very precisely by stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG). SEEG is used as part of the pre-surgical assessment. It consists, thanks to the intracerebral implantation of electrodes in the brain of patients, to perform an intracerebral electrophysiological recording and thus to precisely explore the epileptogenic regions. In order to study the neuromodulatory and therapeutic effects of tDCS on epileptic brains, non-invasive techniques for measuring electrophysiological brain activity such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) and high-resolution electroencephalography (HR EEG) will be used. Finally, since epilepsy is considered to be a disorder of brain functional networks associated with disturbed brain connectivity, the effects of tDCS on cortical excitability by studying the variations in functional connectivity induced by stimulation will be studied.
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