The Expression Of Insulin Receptor In The Brain Of Patients With Refractory Epilepsy

Objective To study the expression of insulin receptor(IR) in the brain tissue of patients with drug-refractory epilepsy and try to find its effect on refractory epilepsy .Methods The 32 cases with drug-refractory epilepsy included in this study were randomly selected from a list of 160 patients in our epilepsy brain bank who had rection surgery of temporal lobe tissue for IE. Among them, 17 were male and 15 were female, with the mean age of 27.3土8 .7(? x±s)years ranged from 10 to 47 years, and the disease course was 3.5 to 30 years(mean 10.2土6.8(? x±s)years). 16 cases were categorized as partial seizures secondarily generalised tonic,clonic,or tonic-clonic seizures, 7 cases as complex partial seizures and the remaining 9 cases as many kinds of seizures types. The type of seizure in the patients was determined in accordance with the International Classification of Epileptic Seizures specified by the International League Against Epilepsy(ILAE) in 1981. For comparison ,we obtained 19 histologically normal temporalneocortex samples from individuals treated for increased intracranial pressure due to head trauma. The mean age was 31.6土1 1.7((x|-)±s)years ranged from 17 to 66 years.Operative specimens from the patients were stored in liquid nitrogen (-196℃) immediately, which was used for gene chip scanning. Other parts were fixed in 4% paraform solution for 48 hours, then they were conventionally embedded with paraffin. We tested the difference of IR-gene expression between the drug-refractory epilepsy group and the control group by gene chip scanning. And then , immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence technique were used to evaluate the expression of IR proteinResults Gene chip scanning demonstrated that the expression of IR-gene was up-regulated in the brain tissues of patients with drug-refractory epilepsy as compared with controls in the same regions. Immunohistochemistry and immunofluorescence staining showed that the expression of IR protein was significantly increased in drug-refractory epilepsy group.Conclusion The results indicate that the overexpression of IR may play an important role in the drug-refractory epilepsy and it may become the target of new anti-epilepsy drugs.