Epilepsy articles from across Nature Portfolio

Analyses of snRNA genes in a French cohort of people with rare disorders, with validation through international collaboration, identify monoallelic and biallelic variants in RNU2-2 as frequent causes of neurodevelopmental disorders with epilepsy.

Zhang et al. examine local and connectome brain features across six clinical conditions in temporal lobe epilepsy using a whole-brain analytic framework. They find that thalamic organization shows the strongest cross-condition influence and that pre- versus post-surgical thalamic profiles relate differently to seizure and cognitive outcomes.

Spreading depression is a slowly propagating wave of mass depolarization that successively engulfs contiguous brain regions, causing transient neuronal hyperexcitability at its leading edge, followed by complete but reversible neuronal silence lasting minutes. Here, the authors present an evidence-based view of spreading depression as a probable cause of characteristic neurological signs and symptoms in numerous neurological conditions.

In this study, the authors present that sleep onset fails to trigger the normal body-temperature drop, and that warmth does not promote sleep, in a Dravet syndrome mouse model. They further show restoring SCN1A function or activating anterior hypothalamus neurons rescues temperature-sleep regulation.

In this Journal Club, Erfan Nozari discusses work detailing a simple, transparent algorithm for iEEG mapping of seizure onset zones and the emergent property of neural fragility at its core.

Status epilepticus is associated with changes in metabolic pathways, a new study has shown.

Brain somatic mosaicism is linked to several neurological disorders and is thought to arise post-zygotically. A study suggests that pre-zygotic aneuploidy followed by post-zygotic partial reversion leads to a recurrent form of brain mosaicism-related epilepsy.