“Epilepsy is treatable and also curable sometimes; but if not treated, it kills,” warned Dr Solomon L. Moshe, president of the International League Against Epilepsy.
“The disease is at least 4,000-years-old and one per cent of the world population is suffering from it. While 50 to 60 per cent patients can be treated with medicines only, others require surgery,” he told Deccan Chronicle in an interview here.
According to him, though the disease was found to run in families, genetic factors alone were not responsible for it. “Damage to the brain due to a variety of causes can trigger the disease.
Even people with normal brain can get epilepsy. Though violent seizures are caused by the disease, not all seizures may be due to epilepsy.”
Dr Solomon, who is the director of pediatric neurology and clinical neuro-physiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, said people tended to keep the disease under wraps in countries such as India due to social taboos. “But leaving epilepsy untreated can damage the brain and in children it can lead to learning problems.”
“Epilepsy is a brain disease and not a psychiatric illness,” he added. He said researchers were out to locate biomarkers for better diagnosis of the disease.
Dr Solomon was here in connection with the annual conference of Indian Epilepsy Association & Indian Epilepsy Society.
He said often epileptic people needed long and continuous medication. The disease could relapse in patients who stopped medication without the doctors' advice. T
he league was working with governments across the world to promote awareness about the disease and help in the easy availability of drugs like phenobarbitone for the treatment, he said.
