Research Portfolio

Grant round winners 2009 Epileptic seizures are caused by bursts of excess electrical activity in the brain, when neurons become too excitable. Yet what normally stops this from happening? One theory i [...]

Grant round winners 2009 It has been shown that mothers who take antiepileptic drugs (AEDs) during pregnancy have an increased risk of having a baby with a physical malformation, such as a cleft lip an [...]

Grant round winners 2009 When the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) decides if a treatment should be available on the NHS, value for money is a very important factor. "Value" [...]

Grant round winners 2009 Certain sub-types of potassium channels have been found to regulate the release of glutamate from pre-synaptic membranes, and dysfunction of these has been proposed to increase [...]

Grant round winners 2009 The main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain is known as GABA. If too little GABA is produced, or if its receptors aren't working properly, this will fail to dampen the ac [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Surgery to remove a portion of the temporal lobe (situated behind the ear) is an effective way of treating temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common type of epilepsy in adults. U [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Absence seizures occur in many types of epilepsy but they are not well understood. In absence seizures, epileptic activity arises in the thalamus (which relays messages from ou [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Nerve cells send electrical signals by controlling the amounts of tiny charged particles called ions inside them, moving them in or out via pores in the cell wall called ion ch [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Dr Kate Everett at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, is studying the causes of childhood absence epilepsy, which affects about 1 in 20 children with epi [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Many people with intractable epilepsy report that psychological factors in everyday life, for example stress levels, can affect how often they have seizures. Some people find t [...]

Grant round winners 2008 Understanding exactly how seizures start is important in two ways: firstly, to develop warning system for people with active epilepsy, to alert them in good time when a seizure [...]

Grant round winners 2008 At least one in every eight people with epilepsy also has depression. Depression contributes to poor quality of life for people with epilepsy, yet epilepsy services at all leve [...]