 |
"Very prolonged febrile seizures, or status epilepticus, are those that occur for over 30 minutes," said Shlomo Shinnar, MD, PhD, director of Montefiore's Comprehensive Epilepsy Management Center, the Hyman Climenko Professor of Neuroscience at Montefiore, and the principal investigator in the study. "Our goal is to address one of the most controversial and important issues in epilepsy: do these prolonged febrile seizures damage the temporal lobe area of the brain and lead to epilepsy and possible memory problems in some children. If so, can we identify the children at risk for prolonged seizures and their consequences. This is a necessary first step to be able to prevent this damage from occurring."
Febrile seizures of less than ten minutes are common in children (2-4% of all children have seizures) and rarely lead to ill effects over time. They are generally caused by a fever-causing illness such as middle ear infection or tonsillitis in children under five years of age. These children lose consciousness and their arms and legs shake for a few minutes. Very prolonged febrile seizures, the focus of the new study, represent about 5 percent of all febrile seizures and are considered more serious.
Their precise relationship to subsequent brain damage and epilepsy, however, remains unclear and is the focus of the study.
Researchers at The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, together with researchers at five other institutions -- Columbia University, Duke University, Eastern Virginia Memorial Hospital, Children's Memorial Hospital (Chicago) and Virginia Commonwealth University -- will evaluate and follow approximately 200 children who present to the hospitals with prolonged febrile seizures. Tests will include MRI scans, viral studies, psychological testing, EEGs and clinical follow up over 10 years.
"Specifically, we will be looking for the presence of mesial temporal sclerosis (scarring of neurons in the hippocampus region of the brain) in these patients and if this brain damage leads to temporal lobe epilepsy and cognitive impairment," said Dr. Shinnar.
Montefiore Medical Center, the University Hospital and Academic Medical Center for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, is internationally recognized as a leader in patient care, research, teaching and community service.
The Children’s Hospital at Montefioreis a 106-bed, state-of-the-art pediatric hospital that opened in 2001 to serve children in the Bronx, Westchester and the New York Metropolitan area.
Montefiore serves as a primary health resource for one-and one-quarter-million Bronx residents, and as a tertiary care referral center offering the most advanced care to patients from the entire metropolitan area and across the nation.
For the News Media
Contact our public relations staff.
Our Public Relations team is informed, connected and responsive. We are at your service, on call 24/7, and we will work hard to help you in any way we can – whether by tracking down sources for your stories or arranging video shoots, or getting an expert to help you in your background research.
Call us at 718.920.4011, or click here to view our Office of Public Relations contacts.
Chairman, Radiation Oncology
Montefiore is establishing new standards in radiation treatment for many cancers. For example, to treat lung cancer we use Image-Guided Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IGRT), which allows unprecedented targeting of a lung tumor without harming surrounding tissue – even when the lungs move as the patient breathes.
