Electrical stimulation of the olfactory mucosa: An alternative treatment for the temporal lobe epilepsy?

Summary Epilepsy threatens the health of more than 50 million people all over the world. The temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) is one of the most common forms of epilepsy and still is one of the commonest drug-resistant epilepsies (so called refractory epilepsy). Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) was the first non-pharmaceutical therapy used for the treatment of medically refractory partial onset seizures in 1997, but its more extensive application was hampered by its high cost and side effects. It had been suggested that olfactory stimulation with chemical products was likely to lead to widespread de-synchronization, akin to VNS in exercising its seizure-reducing property. But it is hard to control the “dosage” of olfactory stimulation with chemical products and the awful feelings caused by chemicals made it difficult to clinic practice. Here we propose an alternative method, electric stimulation to the olfactory mucosa for the treatment of TLE. Different from VNS, a tiny electrode for the stimulation will be minimized into a dimension small enough to fix into nasal cavity and attached to the olfactory mucosa through a nostril in current proposal, so the side effects of VNS caused by operation will be totally avoided. Based on data from related researches, we believe that current therapy we propose here may be a safe and efficient treatment for TLE in the future.