Cortical epileptogenesis of slowly kindled freely moving rats

Abstract

Objective. Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that can be caused by many underlying pathologies. The epileptic and interictal manifestations that appear during the progression of chronic epilepsy are still not understood completely. One of the most frequent forms of this disease is temporal lobe epilepsy in which is clear involvement of the hippocampal formation. In order to study the electrografic progression of untreated seizures we used amygdala kindling in freely moving rats. Methods. Seven animals were implanted with bilateral hippocampal and prefrontal electrodes. A bipolar electrode, implanted in the lateral nuclei of the left amygdala was used for stimulation. The kindled group of animals was stimulated daily with the minimum current intensity needed to reach the afterdischarge threshold. Behavioral changes during kindling were scored according to the Racine scale. Results. The average seizure severity on the Racine scale was 2.6±0.4 by day 6 and 4.4±0.6 by day 20. The first spontaneous seizures appeared after 31 days of stimulation. During spontaneous seizures the preictal spike full width at half maximum increased gradually from 51±4msec to 110±5msec (p < 0.05) whereas the amplitude of the negative field potential deflection increased by 62% (p < 0.05). Conclusions. Our study showed that the progression of temporal lobe epilepsy, as seen in humans, can be reproduced in the kindling model with high fidelity. This study confirms in vivo the increase in preictal spike duration as well as the increase of the amplitude of negative field potential deflection during the preictal period.