Cause of epilepsy in children: Research

Epilepsy affects 4 per cent of the population and is one of the most common brain disorders among children. Cause of epilepsy in children: Research In these cases, the cause could be patches of damaged or abnormal brain tissue known as "malformations of cortical development", which result in a wide range of neurodevelopmental disorders. "This was a decade-long journey, bringing specialists together from around the world, to recruit patients for this study," said senior study author Joseph Gleeson, MD, Rady Professor of Neuroscience at UC San Diego School of Medicine and director of neuroscience research at the Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine. Previous research by Gleeson and colleagues had shown that genetic somatic mosaicism in the mTOR signaling pathway was a contributing factor, said co-first author Changuk Chung, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Gleeson lab. The team conducted intensive genomic discovery using state-of-art somatic mosaic algorithms developed by the National Institutes of Health- "We tried our best to detect mutations in as little as 1 per cent of cells," said co-first author Xiaoxu Yang, PhD, a postdoctoral scholar in Gleeson's lab.