Low grade inflammation in the epileptic hippocampus contrasts with explosive inflammation occurring in the acute phase following status epilepticus in rats: translation to patients with epilepsy (original) (raw)

There is still a lack of robust data, acquired identically and reliably from tissues either surgically resected from patients with mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) or collected in animal models, to answer the question of whether the degree of inflammation of the hippocampus differs between mTLE patients, and between epilepsy and epileptogenesis. Here, using highly calibrated RTqPCR, we show that neuroinflammatory marker expression was highly variable in the hippocampus and the amygdala of mTLE patients. This variability was not associated with gender, age, duration of epilepsy, seizure frequency, and anti-seizure drug treatments. In addition, it did not correlate between the two structures and was reduced when the inflammatory status was averaged between the two structures. We also show that brain tissue not frozen within minutes after resection had significantly decreased housekeeping gene transcript levels, precluding the possibility of using post-mortem tissues to assess phys...