Neurological conditions can be challenging to diagnose when many symptoms affect brain function and behaviors, which can be obscured or misinterpreted as other diagnoses. In many cases, diagnoses overlap, with multiple conditions responsible for a patient’s symptoms.
An estimated half of autism diagnoses concur with epilepsy, but researchers don’t fully understand why.
No validated biomarkers exist in epilepsy. Without biomarkers, it’s challenging for researchers, clinicians, and patients to have an objective way of measuring the condition.
Over 3.5 million people in the US have epilepsy. As many as 1 in 26 people in the US will develop epilepsy in their lifetime. Over 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, but as many as 1 in 10 will experience a seizure.
Biomarkers are an essential component of research into any condition. They have a multitude of uses and each biomarker might even have multiple use cases; some biomarkers might even be used to influence or understand other biomarkers. Like all parts of research, biomarkers evolve.
Health conditions do not exist in a vacuum. You can’t separate a condition from the broader world of cells, tissues, organs, humans, populations, or external factors. Even conveying the scope of a condition can be a perplexing ordeal. We don’t first recognize conditions without understanding how the affected individual is supposedly abnormal compared to a person who does not appear to be affected by any condition.
Epilepsy has been recorded as long ago as 2000 BC and was believed to be an illness inflicted by the gods, or possession of evil spirits. Hippocrates instead attributed the disease, then called the ‘sacred disease’, to a medicinal cause, and laid the groundwork for the world to see epilepsy as a neurological condition worthy of education and support.
Vagus nerve stimulation is a treatment that has been occasionally used to treat epilepsy, treatment-resistant depression, and even Alzheimer’s dementia. Are you familiar with this unusual treatment? Are you familiar with the vagus nerve? Though it’s not commonly known, it’s a critical part of your nervous system and has many potential clinical implications. Let’s chat about the vagus nerve and vagus nerve stimulation, but first, some background and context.