Review on the mechanistic links between sleep characteristic changes and epileptogenesis

Abstract

Sleep and epilepsy are known to have a bidirectional interaction. Although sleep is differentiated into Rapid eye movement and Non Rapid eye movement sleep, Further gets classified into different stages based on the electroencephalogram EEG traces. Sleep is popularly studied using a Polysomnogram (PSG) which is the golden standard in measuring sleep metrics. In 1929 using an intervention with electroencephalography (EEG) made better contributions to objective investigations and clinical observations for unravelling further reasoning. Although there is an increasing evidences of sleep disturbance in most cases of epileptic syndromes the sleep interaction methods are very poorly reasoned out. Using invasive intracranial EEG the evidences obtained on cortical activities of the deep and superficial brain structures are given evidences on the interaction mechanisms of sleep and epilepsy. The sleep spindles are phasic events seen in non –rapid eye movement sleep in mammals. The sleep spindle is relevant in many aspects of brain activities such as sleep quality, memory consolidation, aging and mental health. In the last decade one of the most important understanding the interplay between how spike wake discharge is modulated by the slow sleep waves underlining the role of epileptic activity to sleep .These studies helped to demonstrate how different seizure types affected by sleep and how epileptogenic zone can be better identified for epilepsy surgery. This article will review the influence of sleep in epileptic brain and its significances using an EEG.