Florencio Gobellan Rodriguez / Psychology / Faculty Mentor: Tracy Greer, Crystal Cooper
Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders, a chronic disease of the brain that causes abnormal bursts of electrical discharge, disrupting the normal electrical function of the brain. It is often accompanied by psychiatric comorbidities. The primary aim of the current work is to characterize resting-state spatiotemporal brain activity in pediatric epilepsy using magnetoencephalography (MEG), comparing it to typically developing, healthy controls. The secondary aim is to identify the differences in brain activity between focal and generalized epilepsy. The tertiary aim is to correlate their spatiotemporal activity to psychiatric symptoms, i.e., depression and anxiety. This study includes 53 adolescents (28 with epilepsy; 25 controls) between 10–20 years old (27 females; 45 Caucasian). All participants underwent 10 minutes of resting-state MEG recordings (5 min eyes-open; 5 min eyes-closed). Anxiety and depression symptoms were also assessed with the GAD-7 and PHQ-9, respectively. Independent-sample t-tests will be used to compare the resting-state spectral power (by frequency band) data between the groups. Pearson correlation analyses will be used to analyze the correlation between the clinical data and the spectral power within each frequency band. Results from this work will aid our understanding, and inform treatment, of epilepsy’s psychiatric comorbidities.
Mayte Campos
Great stuff!