[Late onset epilepsy associated with migration disorder: a case report].

We reported a 57-year-old female patient recently suffering from frequent seizures such as motionless staring and oral automatism. Electroencephalograms showed spikes in the right sphenoidal derivation and magnetic resonance images revealed an abnormal region, most likely related with a migration disorder such as a focal cortical dysplasia. She was diagnosed as mesiotemporal lobe epilepsy associated with a migration disorder. Seizure disappeared after medication therapy was done. No previous literature has described such a case, thus this is the first report of an epilepsy associated with migration disorder newly onset in a patient older than 50 years old.

Neuronal responses of the rat amygdala during extinction and reassociation learning in elementary and configural associative tasks.

To investigate functional heterogeneity within the amygdala in appetitive conditioned instrumental behaviours, neuronal activity was recorded from the amygdala of behaving rats during learning and discrimination of conditioned sensory stimuli associated with or without reinforcement [sucrose solution, intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS)]. Sensory stimuli included auditory (tone), visual (light) and configural (simultaneous presentation of tone and light) stimuli. The rat was trained to lick a spout protruded close to its mouth just after a conditioned sensory stimulus to obtain a reward. Of the 609 neurons recorded from the amygdala and amygdalostriatal transition area, 154 responded to one or more sensory stimuli. The 62 amygdalar neurons responded strongly to certain conditioned sensory stimuli associated with rewards. Of these 62 neurons, 45 were tested with the extinction trials. Responses of 31 neurons to conditioned stimuli were finally extinguished, and those of the remaining 14 were not extinguished. Furthermore, responses of 26 of these 31 neurons resumed in the relearning trials (plastic neurons), suggesting that these sensory responses were associative rather than just responses to physical properties of the stimuli. These plastic neurons were located mainly in the basolateral nucleus of the amygdala, and responses of the plastic neurons were correlated with behavioural responses. These results suggest that the basolateral nucleus is crucial in associative learning between sensory information and affective significance for behavioural outputs in appetitive conditioned instrumental behaviours.