Seizures result when the normal, tightly controlled electrical activity of the brain becomes excessive and disordered, interrupting normal awareness and normal activities. The brain slowly regains its normal activity as the patient wakes up, unaware of what happened. Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder among young people. It takes a social toll impossible to measure in disrupted lives for both epileptics and their families. That cost is all the more frustrating because it seems as if it should be greatly reduced if only we had the right drugs to control the seizures.
Many useful drugs exist for epilepsy, and several new ones have become available recently.
But, for about one third of patients, seizures cannot be controlled by presently available medical therapy. Some epileptics can be helped by brain surgery, but thousands remain whose epilepsy cannot be controlled by any present- day treatments. However, up to one half of all epilepsy has no other obvious causes, and there is increasing consensus that most of these cases have some relationship to inherited genes. Recent rapid advances in the understanding of the human genome have begun to allow the identification of genes that predispose to epilepsy. Each one of these new genes seems to cause epilepsy by interrupting key processes in the normal function of the brain's neurons.