Monday’s seminar welcome Pierre-Pascal LENCK-SANTINI (Inmed-Inserm)

When: 21 September at 11 am

Where : Espace Pouillon

Welcoming coffee 15’ Before 

Title: Functional Roles of GABAergic activity during development and its impact on neurodevelopmental disorders.

Abstract: In addition to seizures, patients with epilepsy also suffer from cognitive and behavioral impairments that can drastically affect their quality of life. When epilepsy begins in early childhood, these deficits are most concerning. At the core of the pathogenesis of such neurodevelopmental disorders, it is believed that the disruption of the excitation/inhibition balance, mostly caused by alterations of GABAergic function, is responsible for both seizures and cognitive/behavioral deficits. The idea is that the inhibitionfrom the GABAergic neurons prevents runaway excitation and seizures and that seizures, occurring in the developing brain, alter brain networks, hereby causing  future cognitive deficits. Accordingly most anti-epileptic treatments focus on the E/I balance: they either boosted inhibition or block excitation in the networks. However, the relationship between seizure severity and cognitive deficits is not straightforward. Seizure remission does not prevent cognitive decline in most pediatric epileptic syndromes.Furthermore accumulating evidence suggests that the etiology of epileptic syndromes plays a major role in cognitive impairments. A possible explanation can be provided by the role of GABAergic activity in two major aspects of brain function: the coordination of network activity during oscillations and the construction of cortical circuits during perinatal development. I will present a series of experiments that explore these mechanisms and investigate how GABAergic function could contribute to the mechanisms of cognitive disorders in pediatric epilepsy and other developmental disorders.