Christine K. Fox
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
A stroke in childhood can set off seizures within days and, years later, epilepsy, meaning seizures that keep recurring. Children who develop epilepsy after a stroke tend to have worse thinking skills, lower quality of life, and poorer health overall.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Neuroscience
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
pediatric stroke
childhood stroke
arterial ischemic stroke
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Determine which inflammatory signaling pathways acute seizures activate after pediatric stroke, using banked blood from children in the VIPS I cohort and validating preliminary findings in an independent cohort.
- Identify differences in inflammatory signaling between children who later develop post-stroke epilepsy and those who do not, using blood collected at multiple time points after stroke in VIPS I and VIPS II.
- Map which brain regions and functional networks are associated with epilepsy after childhood stroke, applying lesion-symptom mapping and lesion-network mapping to clinical neuroimaging.
- Integrate laboratory, clinical, and imaging results with machine learning to build models that predict which children will develop epilepsy after an ischemic stroke.
More about the research
Risk is concentrated in those with acute seizures, the ones appearing within a week of the stroke: among that group, roughly 58 percent go on to have epilepsy within ten years. What drives that progression is not understood well enough to predict or prevent it.
Why it matters
Better prediction would let clinicians tell families early and accurately whether epilepsy is likely after a child's stroke, and would sharpen the entry criteria for future clinical trials. Pinpointing the inflammatory pathways tied to early seizures and later epilepsy could identify anti-inflammatory drugs worth testing as preventive treatment during stroke recovery in children.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jerzy P Szaflarski
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Quantify brain temperature patterns using magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging and thermometry, which reads temperature from the shift between creatine and water signals, and compare treatment-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy, controlled epilepsy, and healthy controls.
Hannah Cranley Glass
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine whether children who develop epilepsy after acute symptomatic neonatal seizures carry more damaging single nucleotide variants and gene-rich copy number variants in known epilepsy genes than children who do not, using genetic testing in the Neonatal Seizure Registry cohort.
Leonardo F Bonilha
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Neuroscience
Test whether adding anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to audio-visual speech therapy improves naming more than sham stimulation, in a randomized Phase II/III trial of people with chronic Broca's aphasia.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.