About This Project

Women with epileptic-type seizures that have psychological causes wait an average of 7.2 years to be corectly diagnosed. They often have severe abuse and abandonment histories and waiting for the proper diagnosis and treatment ads insult to injury. Our published assay identifies patients with psychogenic seizures vs. healthy controls with 90% accuracy. We hypothesize that the same biomarkers will also identify psychogenic seizure patients vs. epilepsy patients.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Women who suffer from psychogenic seizures (epileptic-type spells that are not due to a neurologic disorder) nearly always have severe abuse histories. Without proper medical care they do not get well and suffer from the side-effects of anti-epileptic drugs that do not treat their underlying disorder. Making the proper diagnosis for these patients is notoriously hard. Our team has developed a bioassay (blood test) that is able to identify psychogenic seizure patients with 90% accuracy vs. healthy controls. Our next step is to develop a test that identifies psychogenic seizure patients vs. epilepsy patients because the former often end up in epilepsy clinics. This is hard as both have "spells" but it will help many patients if we can do this.

What is the significance of this project?

We have published research showing a bioassay we found can identify patients with psychogenic seizures vs. healthy controls with 90% accuracy. This can greatly reduce the time needed to get these patients the help they need and also save a substantial amount of medical resources. Our primary goal is to reduce the suffering of these patients. Our goal is to further develop our rapid bioassay to identify psychogenic seizure patients so they can rapidly get the help they need.

What are the goals of the project?

Further develop our rapid bioassay to identify psychogenic seizure patients. Our test is easy to apply for clinicians but we need a sample of epilepsy patients to test and improve our existing bioassay. We will publish our research so that our findings can be used broadly and help many patients. A key innovation is that the bioassay we are developing can be done at any time, not during a seizure-like spell as previous bioassays. This means it is easily used by clinicians and can provide diagnostic results in 24 hours or less.