Continuum Audio February 2025 Epilepsy Issue With Dr. Jennifer Hopp
In this episode, Lyell K. Jones Jr, MD, FAAN, speaks with Jennifer L. Hopp, MD, FAAN, FAES, FACNS, who served as the guest editor of the Continuum® February 2025 Epilepsy issue. They provide a preview of the issue, which publishes on February 3, 2025.
Dr. Jones is the editor-in-chief of Continuum: Lifelong Learning in Neurology® and is a professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.
Dr. Hopp is a professor in the department of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
Additional Resources
Continuum website: ContinuumJournal.com
Subscribe to Continuum: shop.lww.com/Continuum
More about the American Academy of Neurology: aan.com
Social Media
Host: @LyellJ
Guest: @JenHopp71
Full episode transcript available here
Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum, the premier topic-based neurology, clinical review and CME journal from the American Academy of Neurology. Thank you for joining us on Continuum Audio, a companion podcast to the journal. Continuum Audio features conversations with the guest editors and authors of Continuum who are the leading experts in their fields. Subscribers to the Continuum Journal have access to exclusive audio content not featured on the podcast. If you're not already a subscriber, we encourage you to become one. For more information, please visit the link in the show notes
Dr Jones: This is Dr Lyell Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Continuum, Lifelong Learning in Neurology. Today I'm interviewing Dr Jennifer Hopp, who recently served as Continuum's guest editor for our latest issue on epilepsy. Dr Hopp is a professor and executive vice chair in the Department of Neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where she's also director of the Epilepsy Center. Dr Hopp, welcome. Thank you for joining us today. Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners?
Dr Hopp: Hi, Dr Jones. Thank you so much for having me on this podcast. I really had so much fun working with you and other authors of this issue and serving as editor. I feel like it was yesterday that I was author of an article in the past. And so, it's really a pleasure to take on this new role and create the content for the issue of Continuum for Epilepsy and really particularly to work with the stellar group of experts and authors that we were able to have us join this year.
Dr Jones: I want to thank you for, really, it's a remarkable issue. And we usually don't get into this a lot with our guest editors, but our last issue on epilepsy came out in 2022. Fantastic issue, guest edited by Dr Natalie Jette. When you were designing the table of contents and article topics for this issue, you had some great ideas. Walk us through your thought process on what was most important to convey in this issue.
Dr Hopp: Sure, I'm happy to do so. I think one of the things about Continuum that is so accessible to everybody is that it really is, to me, preeminent format of updating and educating, whether it's epileptologist, neurologist, trainees in every area of epilepsy, which is obviously an enormous task to really pull together all of these data to make updates and then to make it accessible to all of these different levels of learners as well as people like myself. I really read and always look forward to all the Continuum issues outside of my field. I use it to update my knowledge base, get ready for boards. I also read it as an educator because I want to know what my trainees are reading during their rotations and I want to be able to share materials with them. So, I really tried to go back and look at other issues and think about how we could make it fresh. So, I think one of the first challenges is just making sure that we're updating the content of each article based on the literature and the data we have. That really becomes the task of the authors. And so first of all, selecting the authors was both fun but also really important to me. But the second aspect of it to me was really the question of, how could we make this fresh this year? I think Continuum is always fresh and that it has new data, but I wanted to really think outside the box and I appreciate being able to take a few risks. One of them was really headed by Dave Clarke, who provides this incredibly thoughtful and comprehensive review of access to care and epilepsy. I think for anyone who wants a primer on the issues and language used in discussions of diversity or social determinants of health---you first of all do not have to be in the field of epilepsy to read this. So, you should check that out. But I also thought it was really critical to shed more light on these issues. So, we tried to be mindful of this in threading that through as best as we could each article, but also have a stand-alone section that he headed.
And so, he addresses issues of how to think about access to care for people with epilepsy, but actually, interestingly, also thinking about the investigators, providers, and researchers, and how we think about diversity in those viewpoints as well. I think we can always do better. Dave concludes with a wonderful focus on hope in this area with next steps for our community. So, I think that that was certainly one area that I wanted to take a risk and I think it was quite successful.
Dr Jones: Totally agree. I very much enjoyed that article. We have an article on implementation of guidelines and quality measures by Dr Christina Baca. I thought that was a great choice from your perspective, not only because Dr Baca is an expert on this, but it felt very practical, right?
Dr Hopp: Exactly. Exactly. And that was the other area that I thought really is always covered so well by the Academy of Neurology. There's so much work in updating the guidelines, whether it's the guideline that just was updated on people with epilepsy of childbearing potential or others outside of the field of epilepsy. And I thought that we could use Continuum to help educate all of the readers on how to take those guidelines and measures and then really bring them into practice. I think there's a whole field of implementation science that I think shines a light on the gap between the guidelines and the measures and then really what we do with them in practice. And that's actually what's most important for our patients and for the providers. And so Christine does just an amazing job as an expert, not only walking us through the guidelines that are relevant for epilepsy, but then helping us and providing, essentially, a toolkit to take those measures and guidelines and use them in a very feasible, accessible way in day-to-day practice. And I would suggest that it's relevant for anyone from a student level resident to an epileptologist who's been in practice, like me, for many years. And so I hope that's relatable and useful to the reader.
Dr Jones: I think it will be. And let's get right into it. So, I always enjoy talking to the guest editor. You're already an expert and now you've just read a bunch of articles and edited a bunch of articles from people who are really the premier experts in their area of the field, right? They're niche within epilepsy. So, as you've read these articles across the issue, if there were one biggest practice-changing recommendation that you would want to convey to our listeners, what would that be?
Dr Hopp: I think that's a fabulous question because again, each of these articles, I think, is designed and written by the author to stand alone. But ideally, they need to all be incorporated in practice. And I think what each author was able to really successfully do is not only review the data, but really take us to the next level with practice of epilepsy. For example, I think as we embark on the next couple of decades, clearly increased technology, AI, personalized medicine are all buzzwords and taking the lead. In reality, with advances, we still have to make sure our care is personalized. And we have to remember seizures are really the symptom, but epilepsy is the disease. What I think our authors do well is make sure that our care is personalized to the patients. You could take that from the first article that Roohi Katyall writes about how to approach the patient with epilepsy, which is still, I think, the seminal way to start to think about these patients. But we need to ask issues pertaining to people with epilepsy of childbearing potential; screen for mood, other comorbidities. Mark Keezer does a great job talking about these. And then as we discussed, Christine Baca, PCU, talks about how to then incorporate those practical considerations into practice. Each author also, I think, emphasizes the need to utilize technology and testing and evaluation to make sure that our care is personalized for our patient. For example, we have a focus on certain special populations. Some patients who we see from the diagnosis of epilepsy end up not having seizures. They may have nonepileptic events. And so, Adriana Bermeo-Ovalle and her co-author talk about how to address those patients. Well, Meriem Bensalem-Owen talks about gender based issues in epilepsy as well. And, and that particular article also was updated and refreshed to really address gender and sex-based issues beyond treating the woman with epilepsy. So, I think in summary, each of them really helps us make sure that we're personalizing the care for patients by emphasizing a very thorough and individualized approach to each of our patients that we see with seizures.
Dr Jones: Now that you put it that way, that really did come across as a consistent theme essentially in every article, right? All the way from the evaluation of the patient suspected of having epilepsy to the treatment options to the context of care. Personalization is really kind of a continuous thread throughout the issue. So, I think that's a great one.
Dr Hopp: I think it's still aspirational in some sense, but hopefully practical in another. For example, we certainly are going to make a medication selection when we see each individual patient based on their comorbidities, perhaps genetic considerations, and how they may respond to medications or have risks of rash. But there are certainly still guidelines that we need to approach and think about when thinking about populations of people who have epilepsy as a whole. I think that what's interesting in the field of epilepsy is that we still don't have as much consensus as I think we could on the best way to treat, for example, a drug-resistant patient with epilepsy. One of, I think, the biggest areas of opportunity in terms of personalized medicine as we move forward is that there's such variability on patient care based on the epilepsy center, the tools that we have on how to treat these patients. And I think an aspiration is for us to, in the future, be able to see a patient who has seizures or a person who has seizures, maybe put an FDA-approved device, as Dan Friedman talks about in his article, to help detect the seizures.
Use AI with EEG to detect abnormalities in their studies. And then use imaging processing and genetic or metabolic markers to really end up stratifying the risk and creating a treatment plan much akin to what's done in the world of cancer care. I think what's so exciting in epilepsy is that we have made so many advances in terms of our treatments, but I think there's so much to do to really stratify and personalize care for our patients that we really could take a lot of lessons from the world of cancer and in other fields of medicine to really be able to apply to our area of specialization.
Dr Jones: And I guess that's one of the common tensions in neurology---and medicine, really---is the pull between standardizing and protocolizing. And usually we do better when we're standardized in our care versus that personalization, doing the right thing for that individual person. And I guess expertise lies in the middle, which is why we want people to read these articles, right?
Dr Hopp: Exactly. I think you've hit the nail on the head, and I think the takeaway here is really that we need to do both. There's no question that we can't reinvent the wheel for every person who we see in the office who has epilepsy and not apply the knowledge that we've gained based on all of the research and work that's been done in the field of epilepsy. So, for example, we know that if someone is almost 25 years old, Quantum Brody published that shows that if someone does not respond to a few drugs, anti-seizure medicines, the likelihood that they're not going to respond, it is quite high. So, we need to apply data that we have to patients as a whole. But then, I think, what has changed and evolved over the past twenty-five years is our ability to potentially personalize some of that decision making. And that's where I think the field of epilepsy is right now, and hopefully where it's going to go in the next decade or so.
Dr Jones: So, what do you think the next big thing in epilepsy diagnosis or management will be?
Dr Hopp: I think that technology is really going to play a role. Technology, I think, will take many forms. We hear a little bit about some of the new advances in technology in several articles in this issue. One, for example, is in the ability to manage even emergent seizures or clusters of seizures in patients. The ability to provide a nasal spray that works very quickly is so different than the tools that we had to treat seizures even 10 years ago. I think that technology will likely thread through many different areas of epilepsy care, whether it's in the treatment and availability of different medications or in the ascertainment of epilepsy itself. I think that one of the very exciting areas in technology is in pharmacogenomics and genetics, which hopefully will allow us to close the gap in selecting one of the better medications or best medication for a patient earlier in their diagnosis and in their treatment plan. If we are able to get patients treated more quickly, whether it's with medication or in selection of the best surgical treatment, hopefully we will close the gap in reducing the possibility of drug resistant epilepsy, but also have impact in quality of life and getting patients and people with epilepsy and doing that, doing the things that they want to do such as driving, going to work, getting engaged in the things that make them happy. And so, I think our ability to use technology, whether it's in using a watch to make a diagnosis of seizures or pharmacogenomics to make a good medication selection, hopefully this will allow us to speed up our algorithm in making a diagnosis and getting an effective treatment plan for patients earlier. And ultimately that's our goal. Our goal for patients is ideally to have no seizures and no side effects with a good quality of life.
Dr Jones: Yeah, the technology has really been breathtaking. You know, one of the commonalities between your practice and my practice is electrophysiology. I do neuromuscular electrophysiology, which is much simpler than what you do with cerebral electrophysiology.
And whenever I sit down next to a colleague who is about to review forty-eight hours' worth of EEG recordings, I always think what a massive amount of data and I always feel sympathy for them. What, about AI? What about automated processing tools? Is that something that our listeners should look forward to in the future?
Dr Hopp: I think so. And I hope it's a blend. I hope that---and I always actually talk about this with trainees because I love EEG so much and I love translating the principles of physics and neurophysiology when we're sitting in front of an EEG with our trainees. I am excited about AI and technology. I will admit that I hope that it doesn't replace human readers because I do think that there is an importance in threading history and semiology and thoughtfulness in a human way with the interpretation of EEG. However, you're absolutely right that the amount of data is just becoming overwhelming for epileptologists and for EEG-ers to be able to synthesize in a reasonable and feasible amount of time. So, we already are seeing the applicability of the AI to, for example, prescreen large, large amounts of EEG data and try to at least give us tools for the ability to screen EEG in a more efficient way. I think some of the more exciting areas of EEG that are coming are in the background, which is in the network analysis in high-density EEG. There are very, very smart mathematicians that currently I'm collaborating with in utilizing network analysis of EEG that will hopefully allow us to apply these algorithms to EEGs that even look normal to the naked eye, but actually may have signals that help us predict who may or may not have seizures. I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think there's so much to come and our collaboration and integration with engineers and mathematicians, I think, is going to be paramount.
Dr Jones: Dr Hopp, what was your path to epilepsy?
Dr Hopp: Dr Jones, that is a great question. It was not linear and it really evolved over time, but basically went something like this. I majored in behavioral biology in college, and I was fascinated by the brain and how behavior was controlled by either physiology or anatomy or abnormalities in brain function. And as I moved along in my career and education, I really had a passion for neurology and for behavioral science. But I went to medical school and absolutely loved most of the rotations I did. And in fact, I loved OBGYN so much that I changed my entire career path with the goal of becoming an OBGYN and delivering babies. And I was really torn between two specialties of going into neurology or OB. And I went to a very sage advisor, Greg Kane up at Jefferson. And I said, I really don't know what field to go into. I love aspects of both. I like doing testing. I like making immediate impact. But I also love neurology. And he gave me some of the best advice, I think, that I have ever heard. And I try to share with our trainees all the time. He said, Jenny, I think you'll be successful at either, but which do you like reading about? And I had a relative epiphany at the time, and it was no question that I loved reading about neurology. It was very clear to me that reading about neurology and learning about the brain was just fascinating and led me to do a neurology residency where I was exposed to patients with epilepsy. And it really just continued to pique my interest to read about a field that I felt I could have such an impact. I really could help patients make a diagnosis relatively quickly and have a significant impact, maybe as I would in OBGYN but in a little bit different way. And it really has been, to me, the best choice that I could have made. And on a day-to-day basis, I still love reading about neurology. So, it was some of the best advice that I was given and I try to share that with others.
Dr Jones: What a great question for a mentor to ask. And I wonder if he was really thinking, if she likes to read, she probably should be a neurologist to begin with. You like to read, don't we?
Dr Hopp: I think so. I think he was spot on. I think he knew the answer before he asked the question.
Dr Jones: Dr Hopp, thank you for joining us today. Thank you for such a thorough and fantastic discussion on caring for patients with epilepsy and our recent issue on epilepsy for Continuum.
Dr Hopp: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Dr Jones: Again, we've been speaking with Dr Jennifer Hopp, guest editor of Continuum 's most recent issue on epilepsy. Please check it out. And thank you to our listeners for joining today.
Dr Monteith: This is Dr Teshamae Monteith, Associate Editor of Continuum Audio. If you've enjoyed this episode, you'll love the journal, which is full of in-depth and clinically relevant information important for neurology practitioners. Use this link in the episode notes to learn more and subscribe. Thank you for listening to Continuum Audio.