Journal on Developmental Disabilities
Le journal sur les handicaps du développement

Abstract

Developmental and psychiatric disorders are increasingly being recognized as sequelae of epilepsy. Currently, the approaches used to diagnose and treat patients with developmental and/or psychiatric disorders comorbid with epilepsy are similar to those used for other patients with developmental disorders in which epilepsy is comorbid. However, the increasing knowledge about the etiology of genetic epilepsy disorders suggests that novel interventions will become available. This article reviews the molecular genetics of the epilepsies that have the most common developmental/psychiatric sequelae, and their current treatments. It also highlights the ways in which novel therapeutic interventions for epilepsy and comorbid developmental/psychiatric disorders will become available due to emergence of pharmacogenomics - a research field that focuses on the development of drug therapies that target specific proteins based on a knowledge of the structure and function of the encoding gene. The genes that are disrupted in the epilepsies are of special interest for the development of novel therapeutics. Unusual terms used in this article are explained in the glossary of the companion paper, Part I.

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