Both men and women with temporal lobe epilepsy are at higher risk of developing reproductive endocrine disorders, but the mechanisms linking epilepsy to these comorbidities are unknown. In this talk, Christian-Hinman will describe recent work from her laboratory exploring these issues in a mouse model that recapitulates critical features of human temporal lobe epilepsy. Their investigations span from single-cell electrophysiological measurements of neuronal activity, excitability, and synaptic signaling to whole-animal assays of female reproductive cyclicity and seizure activity. Their findings, which include the first studies describing epilepsy-linked functional changes directly at the level the brain cells controlling reproduction and fertility, indicate that the impacts of epilepsy on the reproductive endocrine system are sex-specific and change dynamically across the female reproductive cycle.
A brief abstract and speaker biography are available online.
Videos of last semester’s director’s seminars can be found on our Beckman Director’s Seminar page.
