Amygdala Memory Enhancement

The Washington University

Status: Enrolling

Conditions: Traumatic Brain Injury; Epilepsy; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; Cognitive Impairment; Memory Disorders; Brain Diseases

Treatments: Device: Intracranial Stimulation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05065450

202104033

Details and patient eligibility

About

The objective is to understand how amygdala activation affects other medial temporal lobe structures to prioritize long-term memories. The project is relevant to disorders of memory and to disorders involving affect and memory, including traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Full description

Direct electrical stimulation (DES) of the basolateral complex of the amygdala (BLA) can improve declarative memory, reflecting the role of the BLA in modulating memory processes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions as a function of emotional arousal. Thus, DES can reveal mechanisms of BLA-mediated memory enhancement relevant to human mental health and disease. DES of the BLA can be used to interrogate the function of memory circuits, especially how neuronal oscillations in the MTL support declarative memory. First, BLA is hypothesized to wield the capacity to prioritize long-term retention of information initially encountered adjacent in time over days and weeks after encoding. Second, the BLA preferentially projects to anterior MTL regions and thus is hypothesized to preferentially modulate memory processes in those anatomic regions, processes thought to support memory for non-spatial items more so than memory for spatial locations. Third, although emotional arousal, amygdala activity, MTL activity, and memory performance are typically correlated, the investigators hypothesize that DES will reveal that BLA outputs to other MTL regions cause improved memory performance by directly eliciting pro-memory oscillatory states in those networks. The expected outcomes represent a significant advancement for the basic science of normal memory function and significant movement towards novel therapeutics designed to emulate endogenous mechanisms of memory enhancement.

Enrollment: 90 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 75 years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Must be able to understand and speak English.
• Able to provide informed consent.
• Diagnosed with epilepsy.
• Scheduled to undergo long-term intra-cranial video monitoring for seizure onset localization.
• Must be implanted with intracranial depth electrodes to the left or right amygdala, hippocampus, and parahippocampal/perirhinal cortices.

Exclusion criteria

• Unable to understand and speak English.
• Unable to provide informed consent.
• Not diagnosed with epilepsy.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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90 participants in 1 patient group

Brain Stimulation

Experimental group

Description:

Neurosurgical epilepsy patients that undergo placement of medial temporal electrode for seizure localizations will be recruited. All participants will view a series of images of emotionally-neutral objects on a computer screen. After each item presentation, they will randomly undergo either active-BLAES or sham-stimulation. Over subsequent days, free recall and recognition memory for these items, relative to new distractor items will be tested. Memory for items presented with and without stimulation will be compared. Brain activity recorded in the medial temporal lobe during item presentations will be used to predict subsequent memory. Such good and bad memory states (biomarkers) will be used to perform closed-loop stimulation when bad memory states are detected in order to enhance subsequent memory.

Treatment:

Device: Intracranial Stimulation