Hannah Cranley Glass
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Seizures in the first days of life are often caused by an injury to the newborn brain, such as a stroke or lack of oxygen. These are called acute symptomatic seizures, and many of the babies who have them go on to develop epilepsy — recurring, unprovoked seizures — in early childhood.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Genetics
Neuroscience
- Topics
neonatal seizures
epilepsy
epileptogenesis
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Test whether common non-coding variants previously linked to epilepsy — in pathways for inflammation, neurotransmitter transport and balance, and neuron growth signaling — are enriched in children who go on to develop post-neonatal epilepsy.
- Build prediction rules that stratify newborns by epilepsy risk before age five by combining genetic findings with newborn clinical features, EEG recordings of brain activity, and MRI brain imaging from the nine-center registry.
- Maintain and follow the multicenter cohort of more than 300 children with acute symptomatic neonatal seizures, together with their parents, to link early-life injury and genotype to seizure outcomes in childhood.
More about the research
Clinical details recorded in the nursery help predict which children are at highest risk, but they are far from perfect, and almost nothing is known about whether a child's genetic makeup shifts that risk up or down. Answering this would help families and clinicians know what to expect, and would point to the biological steps by which an early injury turns into a lasting epilepsy.
Why it matters
Families of newborns who have seizures after brain injury are told only that epilepsy is possible, with no way to know how likely it is for their child. Prediction rules that combine genetic testing with EEG, MRI and clinical findings could give clearer counseling, target close follow-up to the children most at risk, and define which infants should be enrolled in future trials of treatments aimed at preventing epilepsy after early-life seizures.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christine K. Fox
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
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.
Sonya Wang
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Determine the maximum tolerated loading dose of levetiracetam, up to 150 mg/kg, in newborns with mild to moderate seizures through a three-phase dose escalation trial with safety review at each level.
Tricia King
Emory University, GA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Identify the strongest predictors of cognitive impairment in pediatric, adolescent and young adult medulloblastoma survivors by testing environmental resources, clinical factors and genetic variants separately at cancer centers in Georgia, Alabama and Ohio.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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