Project Description Narrative:
There are currently 59,600 individuals with epilepsy in Wisconsin. Epilepsy represents a spectrum of disorders and involves more than seizures. Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain that causes seizures, affects cognition, and has broad ranging psychosocial impact. The gaps in knowledge about epilepsy and treatment effects have led to a call to take urgent action to improve the lives of people with epilepsy and their families. Patients from non-white populations make up a disproportionate percentage (16%) of the nearly 1,000 patients in the MCW epilepsy data registry. Patients with epilepsy represent a community for whom social determinants of health are prominent.
This project will allow researchers to add neuroimaging data to their clinical database, which will elucidate the relationships between seizures, cognition, and brain structure and function in a sample of Wisconsin residents with intractable seizures. The plan is to conduct cognitive phenotyping (determine cognitive profile patterns) on existing cognitive data using a newly developed standardized method. The second step will be to add structural volumetric and functional connectivity brain data (using existing MRIs), both very feasible steps that can be conducted in 12 months. This combination of phenotypic data and imaging data will lead to studies of the effects of various interventions for epilepsy by cognitive phenotype. This moves the needle towards precision medicine for people with epilepsy in Wisconsin.
This project involves the extraction of neuroimaging data, allowing researchers to conduct cognitive phenotyping that together will result in a massive and powerful dataset leading to scores of studies and grant possibilities (e.g., NINDS, American Epilepsy Foundation, International League Against Epilepsy), all with the aim of improving our understanding of the relationship between cognitive phenotypes and imaging biomarkers as these relate to seizure control, cognitive outcome, and quality of life in order to inform future therapeutic interventions.