Читать книгу Canine and Feline Epilepsy - Luisa De Risio - Страница 11

Goddard (1967) was the first to describe that periodic stimulation of neural pathways progressively leads to recurrent behavioural and electrographic seizures. Kindling procedures have provided a substrate for the study of the role of enhanced synaptic efficacy in seizure disorders. It is now considered to be a first choice experimental procedure in the study of the potential mechanisms of epileptogenesis. The phenomenon can be evoked in various brain regions, but amygdala kindling is most frequently used in epilepsy research as a model for complex focal (partial) seizures (Fisher, 1989). Although kindling has been shown to be phenomenologically different from other types of plastic changes in the central nervous system, there are many points of similarity between kindling and the process of long-term potentiation (Sutula et al., 1989).

Kindling has been shown to depend upon functional as well as structural changes in glutamatergic synapses. The anticonvulsant effects of glutamate receptor blocking agents like N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonists seem to be at least partly due to their inhibitory effects on in vitro kindling.