Blog #2: Did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt Have Unrecognized Complex Partial Seizures?

(This blog was originally posted on June 15, 2011)

 

I wish to call my bloggers’ attention to a fascinating article on a historical neurology subject in a recent journal: Neurology 2011; 76: pages 668-669. It was condensed from a larger work, FDR’s Deadly Secret, by Lomazow, S., Fettmann, E., New York, NY: Public Affairs; 2010.

Steven Lomazow, MD, neurologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in West Orange, NJ, researched multiple observations made by President Roosevelt’s contemporaries. Their notes strongly suggest that the president experienced complex partial seizures during the last year of his life. The author concluded that FDR had epilepsy. Brain scars from hypertension presumably were accumulating over his final years; these are a common cause of epilepsy. FDR’s severe hypertension and heavy smoking contributed to his fatal brain hemorrhage.

            Lomazow describes a meeting in July 1944 between Turner Catledge, a reporter for The New York Times, and FDR. In 1971, this journalist wrote in his My Life and Times: “When I entered the president’s office … he was sitting there with a vague glassy-eyed expression on his face and his mouth hanging open. He would start talking about something, then in midsentence he would stop and his mouth would drop open and he’d sit staring at me in silence …. Repeatedly he would lose his train of thought, stop, and stare blankly at me. It was an agonizing experience for me. Finally a waiter brought his lunch, and I was able to make my escape.”

            Several others made similar observations of the president abruptly ceasing conversation with fixed stares and apparent loss of contact with his environment for seconds to minutes. His aides reported that these spells were common. In 1945, “Pa” Watson, a close advisor, told a concerned visitor during one episode, “Don’t worry. He’ll come out of it. He always does.”

            Lomazow believes that these episodes were stereotypical and frequent, as FDR’s intimates seemed used to their occurrence. No mention is made of incontinence, shaking, olfactory hallucinations or other associated seizure phenomena. FDR’s blank outs are similar to the protagonist’s unrecognized complex partial seizures in my novel, “Conner’s Little “Dings.”

            I look forward to bringing more important information to those touched directly, or indirectly, by epilepsy. Please return to my website: LanceFogan.com to read additional blogs as they are posted.

 

 

 

 Lance Fogan, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. DINGS is his first novel.