Editorial: Brain Mechanisms Linking Sleep and Epilepsy

• Published in: Frontiers in human neuroscience Vol. 16; p. 922372
• Main Authors: Kokkinos, Vasileios, Koupparis, Andreas M, Koutroumanidis, Michalis, Kostopoulos, George K
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 10-05-2022; Frontiers Media S.A
• Subjects: Animal models; Brain research; Children; Cognition; Cognition & reasoning; Comorbidity; Conflicts of interest; Convulsions & seizures; Epilepsy; Firing pattern; Human Neuroscience; Hypotheses; Localization; Neural networks; Neural plasticity; neurophysiology; nocturnal seizures; Seizures; Sleep; sleep-related epilepsies; Systematic review; epilepsy; sleep; sleep-related epilepsies; nocturnal seizures; neurophysiology
• ISSN: 1662-5161; 1662-5161
• DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2022.922372

[...]for many people epilepsy begins in sleep, and they are regularly seized with it when asleep, but not when awake” Aristotle, De somno et vigilia, 4th century BCE The strong link between epileptic seizures and sleep was first suggested by Aristotle, who associated the higher prevalence of epilepsy with the larger amount of sleep in childhood and observed that some people had seizures while asleep but not when awake (Temkin, 1994). Sitnikova, in the review titled “Sleep disturbances in rats with genetic pre-disposition to spike-wave epilepsy (WAG/Rij)” is presenting evidence from animal models that spike-wave activity disrupts micro- and macro-architecture elements of slow-wave sleep, intermediate sleep stages and microarousals. [...]Halász and Szucs, in their hypothesis and theory article titled “Sleep and epilepsy link by plasticity” present extensive research and clinical evidence from published literature to support the original idea that epileptogenesis in the human brain is promoted by plasticity-based transformations of normal neural networks underlying sleep processes. According to this hypothesis, such neurophysiological transformations create a vicious circle of interaction between sleep and epilepsy, affect sleep-consolidated cognition, and are responsible for the high association of epileptic manifestations and seizures with sleep.