Enhanced A3R immunoreactivity in
hippocampal tissue from epileptic patients
The unexpected finding that an antiseizure drug activates
A 3R, together with the finding that this
drug only affects excitatory transmission under hyperexcitable
conditions, led us to hypothesize that chronic hyperexcitability leads
to an overexpression of A 3R. To address
this possibility, we used human hippocampal samples from 8 patients with
drug-resistant epilepsy who underwent focal hippocampal resection
(clinical details in Table 2). As controls, we used 6 human hippocampal
samples obtained post-mortem (post-mortem delay ≤ 10h, details in Table
2). Western blot analysis revealed enhanced
A 3R immunoreactivity in samples from
epileptic patients when compared with control samples (P<0.05,
Figure 6).