Thursday, December 20, 2012

Cognitive problems 3

Those of you who have been following my ramblings for a while know, this topic is one of my hobby horses. The lack of certainty of proper research findings frustrates me and the careless way of some authors really annoys me...
I just got a fail and really bad criticism about my academic writing skills last week, but even I would know not to say things like "10-50 % may have mild/moderate cognitive problems/learning difficulties"... OK, rant over.
I had 2 specific questions to Dr Pauli about this subject during our visit in October this year. He has one of the largest HCH patient base and I know that he has a few patients with moderate intellectual problems.

1. Have you had any patients with mild/moderate cognitive problems who did not have epilepsy which is almost always linked with temporal lobe dysgenesis. - He took a second to think through his patients and discussed with Peggy and then said no, all of them had seizures. Of course not all kids with HCH and  seizures have cognitive/learning problems, that is clear.
To be honest this was exactly the answer I expected as this has been my finding talking to dozens of families over the last year and a half. Of course we don't have any research on this, so hence I asked my second question.

2. Has there been any progress about trying to get a hold of the data held but not analyzed by big pharma of about 300+ HCH patients, read more here. And apparently yes... if I understood correctly, the main skeletal dysplasia experts met and this topic was identified as a priority and there was a person named to head the research up. I think someone at Cedar Sinai. I think she was going on maternity leave. Anyway, this is great news and it is certainly something I will keep asking and posting about.



1 comment:

  1. Did I tell you that per Dr. Pauli's request, they went back and looked at her brain scans from when she was born and determined that she did not have temporal lobe dysgenesis?

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