Monash University Joins Prestigious Global Study into the Vagus Nerve and its Impact on Epilepsy
The Vagus nerve is one of the most important cranial nerves in the body – conveying information to and from the brain to most visceral organs. It is responsible for the control of diverse homeostatic processes essential for life, including cardiovascular function and gut motility. Since the early 90’s electrical stimulation of the human vagus nerve, via surgically implanted electrodes wrapped around the nerve, has been established as an important treatment for selected patients with drug-resistant epilepsy. How it works is poorly understood.
Monash University of one of a consortium of eight institutions awarded US$21 million from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate how vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) affects different organ systems what happens and where – when the vagus nerve in the brain is stimulated as a treatment for drug resistant epilepsy.
Led by the University of Minnesota (UMN), the global clinical study aims to reveal the functional effects of vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) across the human body.
The Research Evaluating Vagal Excitation and Anatomical Links (REVEAL) project will take place over three years across UMN, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota; Monash University in Australia; Stanford University; Washington University in St. Louis; Medical University of South Carolina; Sheppard Pratt in Maryland; and Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy.
The Australian arm will be led by Adjunct Professor Vaughan Macefield, from Monash University’s Department of Neuroscience in the Central Clinical School at the Alfred Research Alliance precinct.
Vagus nerve stimulation, or VNS, is already an FDA-approved treatment for epilepsy in Australia and is routinely implanted as part of our partner’s hospital, Alfred Health’s, comprehensive epilepsy program. In the US and other countries it is also approved for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression.
REVEAL will incorporate a large-scale clinical study with up to 144 VNS patients along with three ancillary studies. One of the ancillary studies, to be conducted exclusively at Monash, will perform direct microelectrode recordings from the cervical vagus nerve in epilepsy patients to identify which nerve fibres are excited by VNS.
According to Professor Macefield, these studies will provide hitherto unknown information on what VNS is actually stimulating, as well as assessing the effects of VNS on autonomic, cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, and gastrointestinal function in response to a broad range of VNS parameters. “We hope to generate the largest publicly available dataset on the effects of VNS in humans,” he said.
He added, “Until now we have not been able to record from the vagus nerve in humans, so this research opens up new avenues of research that will contribute novel information on the roles of the vagus nerve in cardiovascular, respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases and in immune dysfunction, as well as contributing to our understanding of how VNS acts to alleviate the symptoms of epilepsy and depression.”
During the REVEAL studies, participants with implanted VNS devices will receive a wide range of tests to measure physiological, molecular, imaging, genetic, and neural responses to VNS, along with many other experimental and computational outcomes.
About Monash University
Monash University is Australia’s largest university with more than 80,000 students. In the 60 years since its foundation, it has developed a reputation for world-leading high-impact research, quality teaching, and inspiring innovation.
With four campuses in Australia and a presence in Malaysia, China, India, Indonesia and Italy, it is one of the most internationalised Australian universities.
As a leading international medical research university with the largest medical faculty in Australia and integration with leading Australian teaching hospitals, we consistently rank in the top 50 universities worldwide for clinical, pre-clinical and health sciences.
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