News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists by tibbydudeza on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @08:05AM (#37234600)
This is so awesome - thanks for sharing this - my daughter also has epilepsy, but it is fortunately controlled by medication.

It seems that stimulating the vagus nerve resets something to default in the brainstem when a cascade event is about to occur - probably shuts down the errant signals from propagating to the entire brain ???.

Do you know which lobe in her brain it happens ??? (my daughter has left temporal lobe)

Re:Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists by tempaway43355 on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @09:05AM (#37235226)
My child has Dravet syndrome so its quite major seizure activity and many different seizure types (tc, absence, focal, myoclonic). I think slightly more left lobe than right but its been a while since we had a full EEG. VNS is known to help with Dravet in enough cases that they were prepared to try the VNS.

The VNS can help stop seizures but also there's a sortof long-term effect from just having it firing every few minutes all the time, seems to re-train the brain in some way. I'm not sure if they really know how it works, just that it seems to help.

Another non-medication treatment that was very good for us was the ketogenic diet. Like, hardcore proper ketogenic diet, 4:1 ratio, prescribed and monitored by an NHS dietician. Every meal measured out by the gram. Its hard work but it did work very well. Its been properly researched - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16146451/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25524846/ - for Dravet syndrome at least, keto is as effective as the best AEDs with fewer side effects.

Re:Why the vagus nerve is so exciting to scientists by yonibot on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @09:40AM (#37235670)
The effectiveness of the ketogenic diet for childhood epilepsy is the reason I thought I'd try the diet for myself - many people believe that it has some neuroprotective benefit in general.

But now after some time has passed I no longer believe it makes sense to do that, until these benefits for non-epileptic people have actually been demonstrated. It's not an easy diet to follow and if you follow it to the degree required for epilepsy therapy, you're restricting your protein quite a bit.