Hindawi Publishing Corporation ISRN Neurology Volume 2013, Article ID 875834, 48 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/875834 Review Article Neurochemical and Behavioral Features in Genetic Absence Epilepsy and in Acutely Induced Absence Seizures A. S. Bazyan1 and G. van Luijtelaar2 1 Institute of Higher Nervous Activity and Neurophysiology, Russian Academy of Science, Russian Federation, 5A Butlerov Street, Moscow 117485, Russia 2 Biological Psychology, Donders Centre for Cognition, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9104, 6500 HE Nijmegen, The Netherlands Correspondence should be addressed to G. van Luijtelaar;
[email protected] Received 21 January 2013; Accepted 6 February 2013 Academic Editors: R. L. Macdonald, Y. Wang, and E. M. Wassermann Copyright © 2013 A. S. Bazyan and G. van Luijtelaar. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The absence epilepsy typical electroencephalographic pattern of sharp spikes and slow waves (SWDs) is considered to be dueto an interaction of an initiation site in the cortex and a resonant circuit in the thalamus. The hyperpolarization-activated cyclic nucleotide-gated cationic Ih pacemaker channels (HCN) play an important role in the enhanced cortical excitability. The role of thalamic HCN in SWD occurrence is less clear. Absence epilepsy in the WAG/Rij strain is accompanied by deficiency of the activity of dopaminergic system, which weakens the formation of an emotional positive state, causes depression-like symptoms, and counteracts learning and memory processes.