ReviewPflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology2012
From sleep spindles of natural sleep to spike and wave discharges of typical absence seizures: is the hypothesis still valid?
Review in Pflugers Archiv : European journal of physiology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 39 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
39 citing papers in PubMed, 87 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sleep Architecture and Microstructure in Childhood Absence Epilepsy: Clinical and Neurophysiological Perspectives.Journal of clinical medicine · 2026Article
- The bidirectional relationship between epilepsy and sleep: a narrative review.Frontiers in neurology · 2026Review
- Review
- Spontaneous spike-and-wave discharges during sleep in mice: circadian distribution and impact on sleep quality.Frontiers in neurology · 2025Article
- Temporal and Potential Predictive Relationships between Sleep Spindle Density and Spike-and-Wave Discharges.eNeuro · 2024Article
- Epileptic seizure clustering and accumulation at transition from activity to rest in GAERS rats.Frontiers in neurology · 2023Article
- Modulation of pacemaker channel function in a model of thalamocortical hyperexcitability by demyelination and cytokines.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2022Article
- Spike-Wave Seizures, NREM Sleep and Micro-Arousals in WAG/Rij Rats with Genetic Predisposition to Absence Epilepsy: Developmental Aspects.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Sleep Disturbances in Rats With Genetic Pre-disposition to Spike-Wave Epilepsy (WAG/Rij).Frontiers in neurology · 2021Review
- From Physiology to Pathology of Cortico-Thalamo-Cortical Oscillations: Astroglia as a Target for Further Research.Frontiers in neurology · 2021Review
- Clinical and experimental insight into pathophysiology, comorbidity and therapy of absence seizures.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2020Review
- Response of spike-wave discharges in aged APP/PS1 Alzheimer model mice to antiepileptic, metabolic and cholinergic drugs.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- The Hyperpolarization-Activated HCN4 Channel is Important for Proper Maintenance of Oscillatory Activity in the Thalamocortical System.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2019Article
- Peeking into the sleeping brain: Using in vivo imaging in rodents to understand the relationship between sleep and cognition.Journal of neuroscience methods · 2019Review
- The Human Default Consciousness and Its Disruption: Insights From an EEG Study of Buddhist Jhāna Meditation.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2019Article
- Absence Seizures as a Feature of Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy in Rhodesian Ridgeback Dogs.Journal of veterinary internal medicine · 2018Article
- An unaware agenda: interictal consciousness impairments in epileptic patients.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2017Article
- Sleep onset uncovers thalamic abnormalities in patients with idiopathic generalised epilepsy.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2017Article
- The Role of Striatal Feedforward Inhibition in the Maintenance of Absence Seizures.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2016Article
- Two classes of excitatory synaptic responses in rat thalamic reticular neurons.Journal of neurophysiology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The temporal coincidence of sleep spindles and spike-and-wave discharges (SWDs) in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsies, together with the transformation of spindles into SWDs following intramuscular injection of the weak GABAA receptor (GABAAR) antagonist, penicillin, in an experimental model, brought about the view that SWDs may represent 'perverted' sleep spindles. Over the last 20 years, this hypothesis has received considerable support, in particular by in vitro studies of thalamic oscillations following pharmacological/genetic manipulations of GABAARs. However, from a critical appraisal of the evidence in absence epilepsy patients and well-established models of absence epilepsy it emerges that SWDs can occur as frequently during wakefulness as during sleep, with their preferential occurrence in either one of these behavioural states often being patient dependent. Moreover, whereas the EEG expression of both SWDs and sleep spindles requires the integrity of the entire cortico-thalamo-cortical network, SWDs initiates in cortex while sleep spindles in thalamus. Furthermore, the hypothesis of a reduction in GABAAR function across the entire cortico-thalamo-cortical network as the basis for the transformation of sleep spindles into SWDs is no longer tenable. In fact, while a decreased GABAAR function may be present in some cortical layers and in the reticular thalamic nucleus, both phasic and tonic GABAAR inhibitions of thalamo-cortical neurons are either unchanged or increased in this epileptic phenotype. In summary, these differences between SWDs and sleep spindles question the view that the EEG hallmark of absence seizures results from a transformation of this EEG oscillation of natural sleep.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.