Seizure Free and Doing What Never Seemed Possible

Two young children a boy and girl

October 2022 | Miller Queen suffers from a severe and debilitating form of epilepsy known as Dravet syndrome, but you’d never know it by looking at him. At 7 years old, Miller is doing things that never seemed possible like playing soccer and going to school.

According to his mom, daily life when you don’t have seizure control is just a rollercoaster, “You’re kind of always on edge waiting on the next seizure to happen.”

Starting at 6 months old, Miller was having as many as 10 seizures a day. Every treatment he tried failed and his parents were afraid to take their eyes off of him for even a moment.

Then, they found Cook Children’s and M. Scott Perry, M.D., an epileptologist and medical director of Neurology and the Genetic Epilepsy Clinic at Cook Children's.

“When you deal with epilepsies that are so difficult to control, it certainly becomes difficult not to feel that there’s not an answer,” Dr. Perry said.

Miller was enrolled in a clinical trial for the drug fenfluramine, which was once used as a popular appetite suppressant. Only a handful of hospitals nationwide were involved in the trial and Cook Children’s happened to be the only one in Texas. The drug completely stopped Miller’s seizures.

“The treatment completely changed his life,” Queen said in the interview with NBC 5. “He’s always been such a happy kid but now he’s able to experience life to the fullest.”

Overall, the clinical trial showed fenfluramine reduced seizures on average by about 70%. The research helped lead to approval from the Federal Drug Administration, opening up fenfluramine as a treatment for everyone with Dravet syndrome.

“The next medication to try and make you seizure-free is probably 2%, but you know what, you might be that 2% so that’s why we keep looking for it,” Perry said.

For Miller’s parents, they know this to be true.

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