Regenerative Brain Cell Therapy: One Woman’s Journey to Seizure Freedom

This week on Seizing Life® Annette Adkins, who has lived with intractable epilepsy since 2014, discusses the impacts of epilepsy on her professional and personal life, and how it led her to participate in a clinical trial for a new procedure that has brought her seizure freedom.

Annette Adkins experienced her first seizure at the age of forty-five, resulting in a hospital stay and a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. During the next thirteen years, she was unable to get seizure control despite trying numerous medications, doctors, and therapies. In that time, her seizures increased in frequency to as many as 14 seizures a day. Annette tells us how the seizures impacted her work life, often making her commute on mass transit a challenging and scary journey, and eventually forcing her to give up her career as a pharmacist. She discusses how the increasing frequency of the seizures and the ineffectiveness of medications led her to consider surgical options including laser ablation and an amygdalohippocampectomy. Annette details how she became a candidate for a regenerative brain cell therapy that is in clinical development for drug resistant, mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, and explains why she decided to take the risk of becoming only the second person to undergo this procedure. Finally, Annette shares details of the procedure from the patient’s perspective and the amazingly encouraging results that she has experienced in the year since.

Learn more about the Neurona regenerative brain cell therapy trial here.

Special thank you to our friends and organizers of Epilepsy Awareness Day at Disneyland for allowing CURE Epilepsy to film this Seizing Life episode onsite during EADDL 2023.

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