News

By Brian Geraghty, Epilepsy Care Foundation & Prof. Norman Delanty, Beaumont Hospital and RCSI

The Epilepsy Care Foundation has purchased land for the development of an All-Ireland Epilepsy Care and Research Centre (AIEC).

Epileptic seizures that last for an extended period of time are among the most common neurological emergencies in children observed in hospitals. These seizures have the potential to be fatal, however the faster doctors can reduce the effects of the seizure, the less chance there is of long-term complications.

Mark Cunningham is the recently appointed Ellen Mayston Bates Professor of Neurophysiology of Epilepsy at Trinity College Dublin. In this piece, he explains the importance of neuroscience in treating epilepsy. ‘

Electricity is life but electricity is an invisible fist punching up your spine, knocking your brains right out of your skull.’

A currently approved epileptic drug to treat seizures has been modified by a University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus professor and is currently being used in a clinical trial in Australia for medically refractory epilepsy.

A group of scientific researchers from France claim they have proven that can are capable of using smell to detect epileptic seizures.

The team of researchers out of the University of Rennes are hoping that their results will lead to new methods of seizure detection.

These new methods may include dogs or even “electronic noses” which would be designed to identify the distinct scents given off during a seizure.

A new study has suggested that when women use Valproate during pregnancy, the odds that her baby will develop ADHD are higher.

This report that was conducted in Denmark however cannot prove that valproate causes ADHD only that there is an association between the two.

However, this study found that fetal exposure to valproate was tied to 48% higher odds of a child developing ADHD, according to the research team which was led by Jakob Christensen at Aarhus University.

As part of its Valproate Response Project established in 2018, the HSE has prepared a Rapid Assessment report of the number of women and children exposed to sodium valproate (Epilim) in Ireland over the past 40 years.

One out of every four patients that are admitted to hospitals to have their seizures evaluated do not have epilepsy. Oftentimes they will have PNES or psychogenic non-epileptic seizures. This is an extremely difficult to diagnose condition and can be quite debilitating for people living with it.

A Trinity College research group have made a revelation in epilepsy research by becoming the first group to describe a model of mitochondrial epilepsy. This raises the possibility of more effective therapies being developed in the future. The paper which outlines these findings was published in BRAIN, a peer reviewed journal of neurology.

Medtronic plc recently announced both the U.S. launch of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) for medically-refractory epilepsy and the first commercially implanted patient at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. According to the Epilepsy Foundation, as many as 3.4 million Americans have epilepsy, with one-third estimated to be drug resistant.