First comes a tricky virus. Then a blow to the head. The result: an autoimmune assault on the brain, and debilitating epilepsy.
The ancient Greeks called epilepsy the sacred disease; they mistook its seizures for the actions of a powerful and mysterious god. Two thousand years later, neurologists know that seizures occur because nerve cells in the brain fire too rapidly, but the cause of that hyperexcitability is still unknown. Although some of the more than 40 forms of epilepsy can be managed by drugs, others are stubbornly resistant. No drug, for example, can relieve the devastating seizures that occur in patients with Rasmussen’s encephalitis, an extremely rare form of epilepsy that strikes children under the age of ten. The seizures, which tend to occur in only one side of the brain, can be so relentless that in some cases the offending hemisphere must be excised.
