Posted on 06/06/2012 8:41:55 PM PDT by neverdem
In November 2008, when he was just 6, William Moller had his first epileptic seizure, during a reading class at school. For about 20 seconds, he simply froze in place, as if someone had pressed a pause button. He could not respond to his teacher.
This is known as an absence seizure, and over the next year William, now 10, who lives with his family in Brooklyn, went from having one or two a day to suffering constant seizures. Not all were absence seizures; others were frightening tonic-clonics, also known as grand mals, during which he lost consciousness and convulsed.
The seizures often came while he was eating. As his body went rigid, William dropped his food and his eyes rolled back into their sockets. If he seized while standing, he suddenly crashed to the ground — in a corridor, in the driveway, on the stairs.
“It’s the scariest thing for any mother to hear that thump, and each time he would hit his head, so it only made things worse and worse,” said his mother, Elisa Moller, a pediatric nurse.
William is among the one-third of epilepsy sufferers who do not respond, or respond only poorly, to anti-epileptic medications. Now he and others with refractory epilepsy are benefiting from treatment that targets inflammation, the result of new research into how epilepsy damages the brain.
“Many of us theorize that the two are tied — inflammation causes seizures, and seizures cause inflammation,” said Orrin Devinsky, director of the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center at the New York University...
--snip--
The amount of inflammation in the brain correlates with the frequency of seizures, she also has found. “This is a novel finding,” Dr. Vezzani said in an interview. “It was not known that inflammation was a common feature of different types of epilepsy.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
/johnny
Seizure? I hardly know her.
Sorry.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my combined microbiology/immunology ping list.
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Can’t opine on the medical part, but the flowers are delicious in full bloom.
Native American cook books might help for recipes and medicine.
“Rectum? Damn near KILLED him!”
Those jokes are corny but I love them!
Interesting, since inflammation is also now considered the primary risk factor for coronary problems.
Fighting inflammation helps a lot of other things as well.
Corticosteroids: The solution to - and cause of - all of life’s problems.
[W/apologies to Matt Groening.]
No animal should be given up on without first using the silver bullet.
I think chronic inflammation is involved in a lot of things: diabetes, Alzheimers’, cardiac issues to name a few. Figure that out and I think a lot of health issues are figured out.
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