Chairman’s Commentary

Abstract

The session on morphological sequelae of chronic epilepsy was initiated by C. J. Bruton with an over-view covering both historical and present views on the pathogenesis of epileptic brain damage. His own experience is based mainly on the unique collection of biopsies from 249 temporal lobectomy patients, who had been operated upon by the late Dr. Falconer. It was pointed out in the discussion that this series, although extremely valuable for pathologists, was collected before 1975, when CT, PET, and NMR were not yet available. Correlation with clinical data is, therefore, limited. This is, in part, also true for the morphological analyses. Modern techniques including immunohistochemistry and transmitter and receptor autoradiography were not performed, but Dr. Bruton announced that some immunohistochemical studies that can be carried out on paraffin-embedded material will be conducted in the near future.