Brie Zeltner: Vania Mahon has been using daily meditation to control her seizures for about two years. She doesn’t take any medication.
But her seizures, which came on suddenly in the summer of 2009 after a bout of bad headaches, are not typical seizures.
Mahon, 41, of Willowick, has psychogenic nonepileptic seizures, or PNES, a diagnosis that is surprisingly common and can lead to many people being misdiagnosed with epilepsy.
Thirty percent to 40 percent of epilepsy patients in hospital monitoring units actually have PNES. While those patients often appear to be having seizures, there is no abnormal electrical activity in the brain, meaning that the seizurelike activity, while not consciously controlled, is psychological in origin.
Like Mahon, these patients are diagnosed by in-hospital observation with brain-wave and video monitoring during seizure events.
“We don’t hear more about this because there’s a huge stigma attached to it,” says Dr. Tanvir Syed, a neurologist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center who has been treating Mahon and others Read the rest of this article…