A metabolic disorder masquerading as adult-onset focal epilepsy

Bella Italia. What a strange day. I am on “emergency duty” for the first day of kindergarten for our daughter. Since the kindergarten is a few meters down the road, I decided to stay home. However, as our windows are currently being replaced, I had nowhere to go. I ended up in a small cafe nearby that I hadn’t noticed before, which turned out to be authentically Italian. Between cornetto e cappuccino, I tried to catch up with some of my blogging duties. For quite some time, I had carried around a case report in the Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases that I eventually managed to read. In this paper, the authors report on a sib pair with alpha-methylacyl-coA-racemase deficiency (AMACRD). Alpha what?? Exactly. I hadn’t heard of this before, either. However, what raised my interest was the phenotype of one of the patients – adult-onset focal epilepsy. Continue reading