The Gamma-Butyrolactone Model of Absence Epilepsy: Acute and Chronic Effects in Wistar Rats

Objectives: We studied the electroencephalographic (EEG) and behavioral changes of the chemical model of generalized absence epilepsy induced by acute and chronic administration of gamma-butrolactone (GBL), a prodrug of gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.Methods: Adult male Wistar rats under anesthesia were implanted with bilateral cortical recording electrodes. The rats were administered 30 intraperitoneal injections of GBL twice daily from Monday to Friday and EEG was recorded 20 min before and 40 min after GBL injections. In order to monitor spontaneous spike-and-wave discharges (SWDs), the baseline EEGs on the subsequent Monday mornings after the first, second and third weekends were recorded for 90 min.Results: The intraperitoneal administration of GBL caused a rapid onset of bilaterally synchronous SWDs in the cortical EEG accompanied by behavioral immobility, vacant-staring and vibrissal twitching. By repeated GBL injections, animals displayed spontaneous bilateral synchronous SWDs in the baseline EEG on the Monday morning session after the GBL-free weekend period (60 h after the Friday afternoon injection).Conclusion: The present study reports the acute and chronic effects of the systemic administration of GBL. The chronic systemic application of GBL may represent a model of epileptogenesis for absence epilepsy

Automatic analysis of hands clapping in severe Alzheimer patient via computer vision techniques

Background: In this work, we present a hands clapping rhythm analysis module of a video analytics framework, which monitors elderly patients and automatically collect statistical data about patient activities. Hands clapping activity is analyzed in terms of frequency of clapping, extent of clapping, and direction change. A severe level Alzheimer patient was chosen from an elderly house. Methods: The main idea makes use of optical flow vectors which represent themotion change of image features in consecutive frames. The algorithm steps are composed of detecting optical flow vectors in skin regions, clustering based on the direction, calculating the average flow vector in each cluster and observing these vectors over time. The magnitude of the average flow represents the speed of motion

Memanti{dotless}ne improves learning in kindled rats

Hippocampal kindling which have been used to investigate temporal lobe epilepsy can also be used to show the relation between hippocampus and learning procedures. In this study we aimed to investigate the effects of memantine, a non-selective NMDA receptor antagonist, by using water maze parameters in kindled rats. Adult male Wistar rats were used in 5 experimental groups (n=8); Control group (C); Sham group (had a hippocampal electrode but have no kindling stimulus) (S); Memantine treated group (M); Memantine treated group with kindling stimulus (MKI) and Kindling stimulated group (KI). After memantine treatments and kindling protocols, an acquisition period of 12 day water maze protocol was done in which all groups performances show a decline of escape latency (EL) and path length (PL) which indicates that they were able to learn the platform location in a spatial way. EL performance of M, KI, MKI groups were better than the C group, also the PL performance of M, KI, MKI groups were better than the C group. After day 9 the difference between the groups were disappeared. 13th choice day performance which indicates spatial memory of C, M, MKI groups were not statistically different from each other but for the KI group 13th day EL and PL performances were worse than the others. Our findings indicates that modifying the neuronal plasticity in kindled rats produced a profound decrease in learning and memory. Memantine improves the changing parameters of WM learning model in kindling