Patterned Hippocampal Stimulation Facilitates Memory in Patients With a History of Head Impact and/or Brain Injury

Abstract

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Jul 25, 2022
Source ID
10.3389/fnhum.2022.933401

Entities

People

  • Adrian W. Laxton
  • Alexander S. Dakos
  • Brent M. Roeder
  • Brian J. Lee
  • Brian S. Robinson
  • Bryan J. Moore
  • Charles Liu
  • Christi Heck
  • Daniel E. Couture
  • Dong Song
  • Gautam Popli
  • George Nune
  • Heidi M. Munger Clary
  • Hui Gong
  • Maria Sam
  • Mitchell R. Riley
  • Robert E Hampson
  • Sam A. Deadwyler
  • Susan Shaw
  • Theodore W. Berger
  • Vasilis Z. Marmarelis
  • Xiwei She

Organizations

  • Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
  • Wake Forest School of Medicine

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology
  • Medicine
  • Psychology

Readers

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  • Neuroscience
  • Trauma Surgery or Emergency Medicine.