epilepsy

The authors say that doctors and other healthcare professionals can use the findings of the research to make children and young adults diagnosed with epilepsy, and their parents, more aware of the risk of injury and to inform existing guidelines on treatment. In particular, they cite the need for more information relating to the safe storage of medicines and the supervision of children while taking their medication to be given by doctors at the time of prescribing and by pharmacists when dispensing prescriptions.

The findings shed light on mechanisms that may be shared between sleep disruption and some neurological disorders. A better understanding of this connection could enable treatments that target both types of symptoms and perhaps provide better therapeutic efficacy.

By looking at patients with severe learning and memory problems, we discovered a gene – called USP9X – that is involved in creating this base network of nerve cells. USP9X controls both the initial generation of the nerve cells from stem cells, and also their ability to connect with one another and form the proper networks.

The new study showed that children with autism who were fed soy formula had 2.6 times as many febrile seizures as the children fed non-soy formula in the database. That means 4.2 percent of the soy group had a seizure associated with a fever, compared to 1.6 percent of the others.

A new study in mice identifies increased levels of a specific neurotransmitter as a contributing factor connecting traumatic brain injury (TBI) to post-traumatic epilepsy. The findings suggest that damage to brain cells called interneurons disrupts neurotransmitter levels and plays a role in the development of epilepsy after a traumatic brain injury.

Wang and colleagues plan to continue studying four genes to determine which lead to the developmental problems such as cleft palate and epilepsy when they are missing. The information gained from this and future studies could inform prenatal testing.

A team of researchers from the National Institutes of Health, Emory University and Cedars-Sinai – specialists in identifying and treating very rare diseases – used three innovative tools to detect a previously unknown gene mutation, test potential therapies in the lab, and initiate personalized drug treatment for a boy with a lifelong history of uncontrollable seizures that caused significant impact on his cognitive and social development.

A staged approach to epilepsy surgery—with invasive brain monitoring followed by surgery in a single hospital stay—is a safe and beneficial approach to treatment for complex cases of epilepsy in children.