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Anti-seizure drugs don’t work in about a third of people with epilepsy. But for people with focal epilepsy, whose seizures originate in a discrete area of the brain, surgery is sometimes an option. The diseased brain tissue that’s removed also offers a rare opportunity to discover epilepsy-related genes.
Many mutations causing epilepsy have been discovered by testing DNA taken from the blood. But it’s becoming clear that not all epilepsy mutations show up on blood tests. So-called somatic mutations can arise directly in tissues like the brain during early prenatal development. Even within the brain, these mutations may affect only a fraction of the cells — those descended from the original mutated cell. This can create a “mosaic” pattern, with affected and unaffected cells sometimes intermingling.
One of the first such mutations to be described, by Ann Poduri, MD, MPH, and colleagues at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2012, was in Dante, a young boy who was having relentless daily seizures. The entire right side of Dante’s brain was malformed and enlarged, and he underwent a drastic operation, hemispherectomy, to remove it. Only later, studying brain samples from Dante and similar children, did Poduri find the genetic cause: a mutation in the gene AKT3. It affected only about a third of Dante’s brain cells. …
