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Digital technologies (digiTech) enhance benefits in healthcare and are present in elderly people lives. Healthcare professionals (HCP) who deal with dementia and related disorders face enormous challenges in delivering healthcare using digital devices, and Covid-19 pandemic showed these pitfalls should be addressed. Technology solutions in elder people are being developed, not every HCP is heard, and we lack information about what these professionals think about this.Using structured questionnaires and asynchronous electrotonic data capture, we asked experienced (84.3% postgraduate degrees) HCP with different backgrounds (8 practice areas) about what they think of technology use among their patients and carers. The average person in our sample (N = 51) was a highly skilled (22.2 study-years) female (70.6%) medical doctor (62.8%) aged 39.1 years old (27 to 77 years), highly exposed to digiTech (68.6% mobile devices usage ≥4 hours/day). Neurologists (37.3%), neuropsychologists (15.7%), psychiatrists (13.7%), geriatricians (11.8%) were the most represented groups. This observational cross-sectional study is part of a Brazilian pilot study to explore technology usage in higher risk dementia adults (DigiTAU Project).Although HCP consider asking patients and carers about technology use to be theoretically important (90.2%) and useful in practice (94.2%), they often do not do it (45.1%). There is incongruity when they feel safe to offer interventions by digital means (58.8%) but commonly agree, on average, that HCP are not prepared to use digiTech (51.0%). Despite having positive views towards benefits in adopting digiTech for patients (98.1%), they think they bring more benefits to families and caregivers than to patients themselves (56.9%). HCP consider digiTech will change their practice in the short term within 1 year (58.8%) and within 5 years (88.3%). None of the 8 options suggested as the most "promising" technology in 10 years reaches more than 25% of the choices.HCP have conflicting views about the usage of technologies by their patients and caregivers but expect some positive changes in their work practice. It suggests new digiTech must be submitted to scrutiny so that its applicability overcomes the challenges. Further studies and analysis are needed to understand better this data.

Introdução. No mundo, estima-se que mais de 70 milhões de pessoas apresentem algum tipo de epilepsia, sendo a maioria destes casos residentes de países não desenvolvidos, e até um terço possuem mal controle das crises com as medicações existentes no mercado. Objetivo. Nesta breve revisão, exploraremos em maiores detalhes dois tópicos onde a importância das células da glia são marginalmente explorados: na detecção de patologias relacionadas à epilepsia através das vesículas extracelulares (VE) e no tratamento através da dieta cetogênica. Método. Foram selecionados, após buscas nas bases de dados MEDLINE e Scielo, artigos que investigaram o papel das células da glia na geração de vesículas extracelulares e na dieta cetogênica. Resultados. As vesículas extracelulares já se mostram cruciais para a identificação especialmente de gliomas, porém estudos demonstram que vesículas provenientes de astrócitos são encontradas no sangue de pacientes com epilepsia do lobo temporal, provando assim sua utilidade para várias patologias observadas nas epilepsias. Já no tratamento, os astrócitos são foco secundário apenas de medicamentos bloqueadores de transportadores de GABA, e nas dietas cetogênicas. Dentre os vários mecanismos propostos para os efeitos desta dieta, como alterações na distribuição celular de ATP, aumento da produção de GABA, e no sistema purinérgico via liberação de ATP pelas astrócitos e sua conversão em adenosina. Conclusões. Muitas evidências demonstram o impacto das células da glia no diagnóstico e tratamento das epilepsias.