Histopathology of human epilepsy

Summary The histopathology of the hippocampus of patients with temporal lobe epilepsy shows two major processes. One involves reorganization of neural circuits in the dentate gyrus and the other a proliferation of reactive astrocytes that have many unusual properties. These modified astrocytes may play a major role in creating an epileptic focus. For an expanded treatment of this topic see Jasper’s Basic Mechanisms of the Epilepsies, Fourth Edition (Noebels JL, Avoli M, Rogawski MA, Olsen RW, Delgado‐Escueta AV, eds) published by Oxford University Press (available on the National Library of Medicine Bookshelf [NCBI] at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books ).