{"doi":"10.11575/prism/38160","title":"Dynamic Oxygen Changes with Status Epilepticus, Seizures, and the Postictal State","abstract":"The adult human brain consumes a highly disproportionate amount of oxygen and glucose relative to its size. Maintenance of the partial pressure of oxygen (pO2) within the normoxic range is critical for brain health; too little oxygen leads to hypoxia, which impairs energy production and can result in neuronal damage and death, and too much oxygen leads to hyperoxia, which can lead to similar levels of neuronal injury. Research into how oxygen and the vascular system contributes to neurological diseases is growing, one being epilepsy. Epilepsy is a neurological disease characterized by the occurrence of self-generated recurrent seizures, which have historically been viewed as electrical events. However, it has recently been shown that following the termination of a seizure, there is a long-lasting vasoconstriction in the brain regions that expressed seizure activity, which leads to hypoperfusion and severe hypoxia. This period of postictal hypoxia is also responsible for behavioural impairments during the postictal state. I wanted to further investigate this phenomenon and establish how the hypoxic period affects behaviour, as well as determine what happens to brain pO2 following other types of ictal events, including status epilepticus and electrical kindling. Prolonged hippocampal status epilepticus produces a long-lasting hyperoxia, and the self-generating epileptiform activity which emerges later is associated with alterations in oxygen dynamics. Repeated hippocampal seizures, induced by electrical kindling, causes a drop in interictal hippocampal pO2 as well as an impairment in associative memory. These changes to brain and behaviour can be blocked by the repeated attenuation of postictal hypoxia following each kindled seizure. Finally, following a single focal seizure of the hippocampus, pharmacological blockade of postictal hypoxia prevents behavioural deficits in the novel object context-mismatch task as well as the Morris water task. These findings show that seizure-driven changes to brain oxygenation have severe consequences for epilepsy pathology and behavioural dysfunction and could serve as biomarkers for electrical ictal activity. This research will hopefully open the door to the production and use of new therapies and treatments for people living with epilepsy.","journal":"PRISM (University of Calgary)","year":2020,"id":131082,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9487,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":487597,"name":"Marshal D. Wolff","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":202,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:16:00.235845Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}