We are shocked and saddened to learn about the sudden and untimely demise of our dear colleague Dr Roger Brumback. This is a great loss indeed to the ICNA and to the worldwide child neurology community.We express our most sincere condolences to Roger and Mary Brumback's family over their loss.  More:  Creighton Pathologist Roger Brumback Loved His Work ROGER A. BRUMBACK, MD (1948-2013) Letter from CNS President Dr E Steve Roach The ICNA  

John Stobo Prichard Award The ICNA is now accepting applications for the John Stobo Prichard Award lecture. The lecture will be awarded to a young child neurologist who has made a significant contribution to clinical and/or basic research. The Nominating Committee consists of eighteen ICNA members representing the six geographic regions of the ICNA. 1. The candidate should be nominated by three members of the ICNA. 2. The candidate should be 45 years old or younger at the time of the ICNA congress in Iguazu, Brazil May 04-09 2014. 3. The nominating members should describe the candidate and...

Researchers from the Florey Neuroscience Institute in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia along with an international team of colleagues have published their discovery of the focal epilepsy gene in 31 March online issue of Nature Genetics1.   The majority of epilepsies are focal in origin, with seizures emanating from one brain region. Although focal epilepsies often arise from structural brain lesions, many affected individuals have normal brain imaging. The etiology is unknown in the majority of individuals, although genetic factors are increasingly recognized. Autosomal dominant familial ...

The 13th. International Child Neurology Congress will be held in the city of Foz do Iguaçu (Iguazú River Mouth), Brazil, from 4 to 9 May 2014. This is the second time that an ICNC is held in Latin America the first one being in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1992.

In the last 20 years Child Neurology has progressed enormously as a pediatric specialty not only in Brazil but in South America as a whole. Several national societies have been created which perform regularly very active local meetings. In Brazil, the SBNI (Brazilian Society of Infantile Neurology) has currently more then 300 members.

12th Conference of the Baltic Child Neurology Association

May 30 - June 1, 2013
Kaunas, Lithuania

The BCNA 2013 Organizers are excited to begin new year with great news. The 12th Conference of Baltic Child Neurology Association Preliminary Program has been announced!

Please find the BCNA 2013 Preliminary Program by clicking the link HERE.

Important Dates!

The BCNA 2013 Secretariat would like to remind you the important dates and deadlines worth underlining in your 2013 calendar:

1 April, 2013 - Early Registration deadline

Please register as early as possible to take the advantage of lower registration fees, to get a chance to participate at the Pre-conference Workshop and to allow efficient Conference organization. More information is available by clicking HERE.

New research findings published in Epilepsia, indicate that having a strong family history of seizure disorders increases the chance of having migraine with aura (MA). Migraine and epilepsy often co-occur in patients. Previous studies have found that people with epilepsy are substantially more likely than the general population to have migraine headache. However, it has not been clear whether that comorbidity results from a shared genetic cause.

The study led by Dr. Melodie Winawer from Columbia University Medical Center in New York  is the first to confirm a shared genetic susceptibility to epilepsy and migraine in a large population of patients with common forms of epilepsy.

For the present study, Dr. Winawer and colleagues analyzed data collected from participants in the Epilepsy Phenome/Genome Project (EPGP)—a genetic study of epilepsy patients and families from 27 clinical centers in the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. The study examined one aspect of EPGP: sibling and parent-child pairs with focal epilepsy or generalized epilepsy of unknown cause. Most people with epilepsy have no family members affected with epilepsy. EPGP was designed to look at those rare families with more than one individual with epilepsy, in order to increase the chance of finding genetic causes of epilepsy.

The Autumn-Winter 2012 issue of the ICNA newsletter is now available to view online or to download as a PDF document. This is the first issue since the 2012 12th ICNC in Brisbane, which was a phenomenal success. See the report from the team later. The AGM held at this meeting voted in favour of a trial of free membership. The effects on the membership numbers are reported in the various officer updates. This brave “experiment” appears to have succeeded in achieving the challenge to expand the membership and to promote the ICNA in its mission to be a truly global association. This year has se...

Preliminary results from the FEBSTAT study has revealed that within days of a prolonged fever-related seizure, some children have signs of acute brain injury, abnormal brain anatomy, altered brain activity, or a combination.Febrile Seizures affect 3 to 4 percent of all children. Most such children recover rapidly and do not suffer long-term health consequences. However, having one or more prolonged febrile seizures in childhood is known to increase the risk of subsequent epilepsy which is estimated to be about 30-40 percent following febrile status epilepticus (FSE). The Consequences of Prolo...

Prof Dimitri Kullmann's team from University College London (UCL) writing in the November 2012 issue of Science Translational Medicine,reports the potential efficacy of gene therapy in focal neocortical epilepsy using a rodent model. The authors created a rat model of focal neocortical epilepsy where they induced epilepsy by injecting tetanus toxin into the rat motor cortex. In this model the animals show motor seizures and epileptic activity similar to Epilepsia Partialis Continua. They then injected a lentiviral vector carrying the gene NpHR which encodes for the light-activated chloride i...

In The Lancet, David Neal Franz and colleagues from Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center report on an international, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 3 trial of the efficacy of the mTORC1 inhibitor everolimus in patients with subependymal giant cell astrocytomas associated with tuberous sclerosis complex. Everolimus is a rapamycin analogue with improved bioavailability compared with sirolimus.