Abstract
Experimental studies have shown that astrocytes participate in epilepsy through inducing the release of glutamate. Meanwhile, considering the disinhibition circuit among inhibitory neuronal populations with different time scales and the feedforward inhibition connection from thalamic relay nucleus to cortical inhibitory neuronal population, here, we propose a modified thalamocortical field model to systematically investigate the mechanism of epilepsy. Firstly, our results show that rich firing activities can be induced by astrocyte dysfunction, including high or low saturated state, high- or low-frequency clonic, spike-wave discharge (SWD), and tonic. More importantly, with the enhancement of feedforward inhibition connection, SWD and tonic oscillations will disappear. In other words, all these pathological waveforms can be suppressed or eliminated. Then, we explore the control effects after different external stimulations applying to thalamic neuronal population. We find that single-pulse stimulation can not only suppress but also induce pathological firing patterns, such as SWD, tonic, and clonic oscillations. And we further verify that deep brain stimulation can control absence epilepsy by regulating the amplitude and pulse width of stimulation. In addition, based on our modified model, 3 : 2 coordinated reset stimulation strategies with different intensities are compared and a more effective and safer stimulation mode is proposed. Our conclusions are expected to give more theoretical insights into the treatment of epilepsy.
Highlights
Epilepsy has been the second worldwide neurological disorder that affects over 65 million people [1]
It is considered that the cortex subnetwork and the thalamus subnetwork are mainly mediated by glutamate receptors [51]
We provide a possibility that astrocytes are involved in epileptic seizure and we are dedicated to studying the transition dynamics induced by astrocyte dysfunction
Summary
Epilepsy has been the second worldwide neurological disorder that affects over 65 million people [1]. As a type of generalized epilepsy, absence epilepsy is featured by periodic 24 Hz SWDs in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings, mainly occurring in children and accompanying a brief impairment of consciousness in seizures [2,3,4]. Epileptic tonic and clonic seizures are the primary generalized seizures, seriously affecting the patients’ life [5,6,7]. The EEG of patients with tonic seizures shows high-frequency and lowamplitude rapid discharge activities, while clonic seizures exhibit low-frequency and high-amplitude slow-wave oscillations [8, 9]. Since the causes of epilepsy are complex and the pathogenesis is still not entirely clear, it has become a major topic for many neuroscientists
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