Natalio Fejerman, leading Argentine child neurologist and epileptologist, died on Thursday, March 29, after a short sickbed. He was 84 years old.  Natalio Fejerman was born in Buenos Aires on November 8 th , 1933. He earned his medical degree from Medical School in Buenos Aires in 1957 and started his professional training at the Children's Hospital Ricardo Gutierrez in Buenos Aires and later at Boston Children's Hospital under Prof. Cesare Lombroso. He was the head of the Department of Neu...

In a study published in Current Biology today, researchers from  King's College London uncovers the precise mechanisms by which autophagy leads to cell death. The  study used a  mouse model for the polyglutamine disease dentatorubral-pallidoluysian atrophy (DRPLA), progressive acquirement of an ataxic phenotype linked to severe cerebellar cellular pathology, characterized by nuclear degeneration through nucleophagy-based LaminB1 degradation and excretion.  DRPLA is caused by ...

  In a study published in The FASEB Journal a team of NIH-funded scientists reports on a potential drug that could be protective in ischemic stroke patients.  The clue for the study came from observations in hibernating ground squirrels. In these animals there is a dramatic reduction of cerebral blood flow during hibernation, yet they emerge from their sleep without any ill effects at all.  The researchers observed that a cellular process called SUMOylation goes into overdrive in ...

New research published in Epilepsia , a journal of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), indicates that wristband devices may improve the detection and characterization of seizures in patients with epilepsy. In their attempts to develop a better monitoring method, Giulia Regalia, PhD and Francesco Onorati, PhD, of Empatica Inc. in Milan, Italy and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and their colleagues examined the potential of automated, wearable systems to detect and characterize convulsive...

This largest whole-genome sequencing study on epilepsy  was piloted by Jacques Michaud, Pediatrician at CHU Sainte-Justine and Professor of Pediatrics and Neuroscience at the Faculty of Medicine of Université de Montreal and his colleagues, Elsa Rossignol and Patrick Cossette of Universite de Montréal and Berge Minassian of the University of Toronto.  The team identified eight new genes involved in this type of epilepsy thanks to their use of whole-genome sequencing, which had nev...