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Myoclonic astatic epilepsy is an extremely uncommon epilepsy syndrome that affects only 2 out of every 100 children with epilepsy. It more commonly affects males and symptoms can become clear between the ages of 18 months and 5 years. This syndrome has no known cause, but is widely believed to be as a result of…

Category: Syndromes

Lennox-Gastaut is a rare epilepsy syndrome that only affects between 1 to 5 children out of every 100 that have epilepsy. It’s also well known to be one of the most difficult childhood epilepsies to treat, also known as ‘intractable’. Lennox-Gastaut syndrome usually starts in children between the ages of 3 to 5, although it…

Category: Syndromes

Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS) is an extremely rare childhood epilepsy syndrome that affects boys twice as much as it affects girls and usually develops around the ages of 3 - 6. One of the key features of LKS is that it can affect speech and language skills in children and most likely result in behavioural problems.…

Category: Syndromes

Juvenile absence epilepsy (JAE) is an epilepsy syndrome that’s quite common. It’s slightly more prevalent in girls than boys and presents mostly with absence seizures, which can mean that it’s easily confused for childhood absence epilepsy (CAE) and juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME).  Symptoms  With JAE, seizures will most often start between 9 - 12 years…

Category: Syndromes

In July 2019, young actor, Cameron Boyce tragically died in his sleep as a result of SUDEP (Sudden Unexplained Death in Epilepsy). Cameron was known for his roles in a number of Hollywood films and TV shows, including Grown Ups, Descendants and Jessie.  Of course, within the epilepsy community SUDEP is not new. However, the…

Category: Living with Epilepsy, Syndromes

Gelastic epilepsy is a very rare syndrome that affects 1 out of every 1,000 children with epilepsy and is slightly more common in boys than girls. The syndrome takes its name from the Greek word, gelastikos, which means laughter because seizures will often start with unexplained laughter. The laughter is often described as being hollow…

Category: Syndromes