From: drarwingnuttephd@gmail.com   
      
   Link seen between seizures and migraines in the brain    
      
   Migraine    
   Credit: Sasha Wolff/Wikipedia    
      
   Seizures and migraines have always been considered separate physiological   
   events in the brain, but now a team of engineers and neuroscientists looking   
   at the brain from a physics viewpoint discovered a link between these and   
   related phenomena.    
      
   Scientists believed these two brain events were separate phenomena because   
   they outwardly affect people very differently. Seizures are marked by   
   electrical hyperactivity, but migraine auras--based on an underlying process   
   called spreading depression--are    
   marked by a silencing of electrical activity in part of the brain. Also,   
   seizures spread rapidly, while migraines propagate slowly.    
   "We wanted to make a more realistic model of what underlies migraines, which   
   we were working on controlling," said Steven J. Schiff, Brush Chair Professor   
   of Engineering and director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering.   
   "We realized that no    
   one had ever kept proper track of the neuronal energy being used and all of   
   the ions, the charged atoms, going into and out of brain cells."    
   Potassium and sodium contribute the ions that control electricity in the   
   brain. The Penn State researchers added fundamental physics principles of   
   conservation of energy, charge and mass to an older theory of this   
   electricity. They kept track of the    
   energy required to run a nerve cell, and kept count of the ions passing into   
   and out of the cells.    
      
   The brain needs a constant supply of oxygen to keep everything running because   
   it has to keep pumping the ions back across cell membranes after each   
   electrical spike. The energy supply is directly linked to oxygen   
   concentrations around the cell and the    
   energy required to restore the ions to their proper places is much greater   
   after seizures or migraines.    
      
   "We know that some people get both seizures and migraines," said Schiff.   
   "Certainly, the same brain cells produce these different events and we now   
   have increasing numbers of examples of where single gene mutations can produce   
   the presence of both    
   seizure and migraines in the same patients and families. So, in retrospect,   
   the link was obvious--but we did not understand it."    
      
   The researchers, who also included Yina Wei, recent Penn State Ph.D. in   
   engineering science and mechanics, currently a postdoctoral fellow at   
   University of California-Riverside, and Ghanim Ullah, former Penn State   
   postdoctoral fellow, now a professor of    
   physics at University of South Florida, explored extending older models of   
   brain cell activity with basic conservation principles. They were motivated by   
   previous Penn State experiments that showed the very sensitive link between   
   oxygen concentration    
   with reliable and rapid changes in nerve cell behavior.    
      
   What they found was completely unexpected. Adding basic conservation   
   principles to the older models immediately demonstrated that spikes, seizures   
   and spreading depression were all part of a spectrum of nerve cell behavior.   
   It appeared that decades of    
   observations of different phenomena in the brain could share a common   
   underlying link.    
      
   "We have found within a single model of the biophysics of neuronal membranes   
   that we can account for a broad range of experimental observations, from   
   spikes to seizures and spreading depression," the researchers report in a   
   recent issue of the Journal of    
   Neuroscience. "We are particularly struck by the apparent unification possible   
   between the dynamics of seizures and spreading depression."    
   While the initial intent was to better model the biophysics of the brain, the   
   connection and unification of seizures and spreading depression was an   
   emergent property of that model, according to Schiff.    
      
   "No one, neither us nor our colleagues anticipated such a finding or we would   
   have done this years ago," said Schiff. "But we immediately recognized what   
   the results were showing and we worked intensively to test the integrity of   
   this result in many ways    
   and we found out how robust it was. Although the mathematics are complex, the   
   linking of these phenomena seems rock solid."    
      
   The ability to better understand the difference between normal and   
   pathological activity within the brain may lead to the ability to predict when   
   a seizure might occur.    
      
   "We are not only interested in controlling seizures or migraines after they   
   begin, but we are keen to seek ways to stabilize the brain in normal operating   
   regimes and prevent such phenomena from occurring in the first place," said   
   Schiff. "This type of    
   unification framework demonstrates that we can now begin to have a much more   
   fundamental understanding of how normal and pathological brain activities   
   relate to each other. We and our colleagues have a lot on our plate to start   
   exploring over the coming    
   years as we build on this finding."    
        
   Explore further: Molecular imbalance linked to brain tumour seizures    
   Journal reference: Journal of Neuroscience      
   Provided by Pennsylvania State University    
      
      
      
        
   http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-10-link-seizures-migraines-brain.html#nRlv   
      
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