Epilepsy

Nodding syndrome: 2015 international conference report and Gulu accord

Nodding syndrome is a pediatric epileptic encephalopathy of apparent environmental origin that was first described in Tanzania, with recent epidemics in South Sudan and Uganda. Following a brief description of the medical geography, setting and case definition of this progressive brain disorder, we report recent advances relating to etiology, diagnosis and treatment described in papers given at the 2nd International Conference on Nodding Syndrome held in July 2015 in Gulu,...

Nodding syndrome is unlikely to be an autoimmune reaction to leiomodin-1 after infection by Onchocerca volvulus

Nodding syndrome is a neurological disease of children in northern Uganda. Infection with the nematode parasite Onchocerca volvulus has been epidemiologically implicated as the cause of the disease. It has been proposed that an autoantibody directed against the human protein leiomodin-1 cross reacts with a tropomyosin-like nematode protein, thus suggesting that nodding syndrome is an autoimmune brain disease due to extra-cerebral parasitism. This hypothesis is dependent on constitutive neuronal expression...

Conceptual modeling of nodding syndrome: A system dynamics and sequence approaches

Conceptual modelling of nodding syndrome (NS) has hardly been considered in most scientific literature although symptoms of the disease have been widely studied. A conceptual model is a representation of hypothesis about a system under investigation and enables a comparison between hypothesis and data. Since nodding syndrome is an unexplained neurological illness that mainly affects children aged between 5 to 15 years, without specific diagnosis and treatment, the aetiology remains...