Pathological Sensitization of the Dopamine System in Experimental Epileptogenesis

In the long-term clinical course of epilepsy, there is an increased incidence of the development of schizophrenia-like paranoid symptoms, such as delusion and hallucination. The prevalence of this epileptic psychosis appears to be about 7–11%, which is much higher than in the general population.22,37 Since some patients with epileptic psychosis show an inverse correlation between the presence of epilepsy and the psychosis, this phenomenon was has been labeled “forced normalization” or “alternative psychosis” (see review of Krishnamoorthy and Trimble18). Slater et al.,30 on the other hand, reported that the emergence of epileptic psychosis was related to the duration of epilepsy and to the brain damage, and was linked to temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).