Background:
Ruth Ottman, Ph.D. is Professor of Epidemiology and Deputy Director for Research of the Sergievsky Center, Columbia University; and Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She received an A.B. in zoology in 1975 and a Ph.D. in genetics in 1980 at the University of California, Berkeley, and completed a post-doc in cancer epidemiology at the same institution in 1981. She joined the faculty in epidemiology at Columbia University in 1981.
Dr. Ottman’s primary area of expertise is genetic epidemiology. Her research addresses the role of inherited factors in susceptibility to neurologic disorders, primarily focusing on seizure disorders. She is also interested in methodologic issues in genetic epidemiology, including research designs for testing gene-environment interaction, methods for collection of valid family history data, and approaches to assessing familial aggregation.
Her group’s work on epilepsy has included assessment of familial aggregation, shared vs. distinct genetic influences on different types of epilepsy, consistency with specific modes of inheritance, comorbidity of epilepsy and migraine, teratogenic effects of anticonvulsant medications, reproductive rates in persons with epilepsy, and gene localization and identification. They are currently conducting three different studies of the genetic epidemiology of epilepsy. In the first, they are attempting to localize genes that raise risk by performing genetic linkage analysis in 89 families with various forms of nonsymptomatic epilepsy. In the second, based at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, they are studying the shared and distinct genetic influences on different forms of epilepsy. This study includes all 1,056 Rochester residents born in 1920 or later who had incidence of epilepsy or an isolated unprovoked seizure between 1935 and 1994, and a matched set of controls. In the third study, they are focusing on a specific form of epilepsy, autosomal dominant lateral temporal lobe epilepsy (ADLTLE), a form of idiopathic temporal lobe epilepsy with auditory symptoms as a major manifestation. Ottman’s group was the first to recognize this syndrome. In 1995, they reported a single large family with the syndrome and mapped the gene to chromosome 10q24. Then in 2002, they identified the gene as LGI1 (leucine-rich, glioma inactivated 1). They are performing additional studies to learn more about this gene’s role in ADLTLE and other forms of epilepsy.
Selected publications
