Why West? Comparisons of clinical, genetic and molecular features of infants with and without spasms.

Anne T Berg
Samya Chakravorty
Sookyong Koh
Zachary M Grinspan
Renée A Shellhaas
Russell P Saneto
William D Gaillard, George Washington University
+several additional authors

Reproduced with permission of PLoS ONE

Abstract

Infantile spasms are the defining seizures of West syndrome, a severe form of early life epilepsy with poorly-understood pathophysiology. We present a novel comparative analysis of infants with spasms versus other seizure-types and identify clinical, etiological, and molecular-genetic factors preferentially predisposing to spasms. We compared ages, clinical etiologies, and associated-genes between spasms and non-spasms groups in a multicenter cohort of 509 infants (