Date: September 16, 2025
Time: 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Track: Traditional Special Interest Group (SIG)
Psychiatric comorbidity and epilepsy have a bidirectional relationship, suggesting a common underlying pathophysiology that is not well understood. Further, psychiatric comorbidities are especially common in epilepsy and associated with numerous adverse outcomes, yet underrecognized and undertreated in clinical practice. Thus, translational research is needed in this area, spanning the entire translational spectrum from basic science through clinical implementation, to shed light on the common underlying pathophysiology and close gaps in care for people with epilepsy. A fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of the shared association of epilepsy and psychiatric comorbidity could lead to new therapies with potential to better target both mental health and epilepsy simultaneously, and help close care gaps. In the meantime, implementation strategies to close clinical care gaps in detection and treatment of psychiatric comorbidity and integrate mental health care with epilepsy care are promising to improve patient outcomes. In this session, speakers will discuss innovative animal model research methods to investigate behavior and epilepsy simultaneously, new neuroimaging-based insights into psychiatric symptoms in epilepsy, and strategies to close today’s care gaps via integrated mental health care guided by implementation science.
At the conclusion of this session, attendees should be able to:
This presentation will discuss implementation strategies and integrated mental health care to close gaps in anxiety & depression screening and treatment in epilepsy will be discussed.
This presentation will cover how brain lesions can identify causal brain networks in epilepsy and depression and how these networks spatially relate to each other.
This presentation is an overview of insights and technologies that have been applied to understand the determinants of psychiatric comorbidity using mouse models.