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Rasmussen Encephalitis
What are the causes?
Patients affected by RE may have two kinds of problems: the functional decline caused by the progressive one-sided brain tissue loss and epilepsy. At some time during the early course of the disease, there may be an overlap between these two when unilateral motor seizures cause a transient postictal paresis (weakness that occurs in certain parts of the body after a seizure). With time, however, fixed motor, sensory, visual field and – if the dominant hemisphere is affected – language deficits become apparent. The neurological deficits observed after several years of disease duration vary from case to case. In addition, epilepsy can be of varying severity. On the one hand, there are the patients with highly distressing and debilitating continuous motor seizures (‘twitching’, the medical term being epilepsia partialis continua), whilst on the other, there are patients with mild, infrequent or even absent seizures (when a person has a brief loss of consciousness or 'absence' for a few seconds, it may appear that the person is daydreaming or staring into space).
What are the symptoms?
| How is it treated? 
