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Editorial Review Product Description
Leading international authorities in childhood neurology present a critical new appraisal of a childhood condition that has intrigued pediatric neurologists worldwide. An outstanding roster of specialists sheds new light on alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), providing vital new links in our understanding of this baffling disorder in the areas of diagnosis and treatment. The book begins with an historical perspective on AHC, and continues with clinical findings and diagnostic criteria for the condition. Subsequent chapters examine the natural history and occurrence of the disorder in different patient populations; report on epilepsy and electrographic investigations, metabolic studies, sleep studies, and genetic findings; and explore treatments such as flunarizine, haloperidol, and rectal chloral hydrate. Other chapters address imaging procedures in children with alternating hemiplegia and discuss the latest findings on the relationship of migraine to the disorder. ... Read more Customer Reviews (1) 
Review of "Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood"
I read this book to obtain more information for a neuroscience paper on alternating hemiplegia of childhood. The aim of this review is to give readers an overall idea of the content, quality, and style of information presentation in the book "Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood: International Review of Child Neurology Series". As one of the few books available which exclusively discuss the rare disease alternating hemiplegia of childhood (AHC), I expect that most others looking for information on AHC will run into this book in their searches.I hope this review will be useful in helping both academics interested in learning more about the disease and parents who have children with AHC, decide whether this is a good resource for them.For my purposes as an undergraduate biology student, I was overall pleased with the breadth and depth of the material presented in this book. It appears to be a good synopsis of the research literature available on AHC from the 1970s through the early 1990s.
This book is written in the style of a scientific review article. It is broken down into twenty-eight chapters, each of which is a review article devoted to a particular study or set of very closely related studies. The book is well organized, and its progression is logical. It begins with a description of the disease symptoms and discusses the diagnosis of AHC. The book then discusses studies which attempted to determine the cause of AHC. It also contains a section on variant forms of the disease which is followed by a section with several articles discussing AHC's treatment.
The description of the symptoms of AHC is extremely in-depth, with characteristics of AHC described in almost every article in the book. On top of the detail, useful generalizations are often made, including the observation that "AHC is an unusual disorder of unknown etiology, characterized by easily recognizable clinical features". The first five articles in particular describe the characteristics, diagnostic criteria, progression, and other clinical findings for AHC in great detail. This makes the book redundant for those who choose to read the entirety of it rather than separate articles, but it is useful for anyone who wants to pick and choose certain articles. The redundancy is also useful for those, like me, who may find the scientific jargon confusing the first time they read through it.
The second section, entitled `Investigation of Patients with Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood', describes a diverse set of experiments done with AHC patients which attempt to both physically describe AHC and shed light on the cause of it.Some of these studies are rather dead-ended, such as one on sleep where it was determined that "despite the clinical evidence of a relationship between AHC attacks and sleep, the basic sleep generation processes did not seem to be abnormal in this disease". Other study conclusions, such as the fact that "persistent abnormalities of the blink reflex... support the hypothesis of a permanent brainstem dysfunction in AHC" are somewhat conclusive, though the cause of AHC is still not known. Overall, this section is informative, but much less well-structured than the first. The concept of how the conclusions of these diverse studies affect our understanding of AHC as a whole is difficult to grasp.
The next section describes unusual forms of AHC as well as related disorders. This section is informative and very broad in scope. The information is possibly useful, but the variability of the information is such that it is difficult to see how much of this relates to understanding actual AHC.In my opinion this section was the least useful for my increased knowledge and understanding of AHC.
The final section examines possible treatments for AHC. Fittingly, this section is titled `Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood: Attempts at Treatment', because no completely successful treatment has been found yet. In fact, the best current treatment is flunarizine, which decreases the severity and length of the attacks in some patients, but has no effect on the frequency of attacks. This is one of the most informative sections because it deals in depth with the shortcomings of the current knowledge on how to treat AHC.
The most useful and well-written part of this book is the conclusion chapter titled `Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood: An Overview'. While the layout of this book is logical and the chosen topics are relevant, it is generally presented as a large amount of material which is related but not always presented in the best way to promote overall understanding of the disease. The final article ties all of this very specific information together to give a good over-arching picture of alternating hemiplegia of childhood.
I found this book extremely useful for my understanding of AHC despite several shortcomings which the authors cannot be faulted for. As an undergraduate student I had some trouble with the scientific jargon used in the book and found it difficult to comprehend at times. However, I cannot fault the authors for this because the book was clearly never intended for a non-scientific audience. Despite certain difficulties, I obtained a significant amount of useful information from this book. The literature is slightly outdated, but it is still applicable and overall I found the book to be very well organized. There was slightly too much description of the disease, and conclusive research into the causes of AHC was lacking. However, much of this was due to the unavailability of such research. Another gap in the scientific data occurred because of the rarity of the disease. Many of these papers were based on one or several case studies. Such small numbers of patients does not usually generate statistically significant data, so it is difficult to make concise conclusions. However, this is again not the authors' fault - AHC is simply too rare for large sample sizes to be available.
I would recommend this book to both graduate and undergraduate students as well as anyone else with a scientific background as a good resource for furthering their understanding of AHC. Other undergraduates will, I believe, have some difficulty with the language like I did, but there is still a lot of useful information to be obtained. I would not recommend this book to parents of children with AHC. For one, some of the material is outdated, so while it is interesting from a scientific standpoint, there is more current information available which would probably be of more use to parents. Furthermore, while this book does discuss the effectiveness of certain treatments, the management and treatment of alternating hemiplegia is not the main topic. Nor are any recommendations made as far as how AHC should be treated. Also, as mentioned earlier, the jargon of the book makes for a difficult read for anyone without a scientific background, so this could be a frustrating issue for parents who are not used to scientific literature. The only other readily available book on alternating hemiplegia of childhood is "The Official Parent's Sourcebook on Alternating Hemiplegia", and it may be more appropriate for parents without a scientific background who wish to find information pertinent to their child.
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