A child's smile should be a comfort to his parents, but a 14-year-old boy, Peng Peng's smile, is a nightmare for his parents. Recently, at the Epilepsy Center of Beijing Sanbo Brain Hospital affiliated to Capital Medical University, it was found that Peng Peng's smiling face was caused by seizures caused by hypothalamic hamartoma.

Five months after Peng Peng was born, he began to laugh and play cute. At first, his parents were very happy and thought his son was attractive. At the age of 3, in addition to laughing, Peng Peng also involuntarily grabbed his head, turned his head and kept rotating his body. This caused parents' vigilance, and then they were diagnosed with epilepsy in the local hospital and took anti epileptic drugs. But the attack has not been controlled for 13 years.

In order to help his son get rid of epilepsy, the family came to the epilepsy center of Beijing Sanbo Brain Hospital for medical treatment. After detailed preoperative examination and evaluation, Pengpeng was diagnosed as a frequent episode of giggling epilepsy, and its epileptogenic focus was hypothalamic hamartoma located in the midline of the brain. Guan Yuguang, deputy chief physician of Sanbo Epilepsy Center, introduced that giggling epilepsy is characterized by uncontrollable laughter. This kind of epilepsy caused by hypothalamic hamartoma must be treated as soon as possible in order to effectively control seizures. At present, the most effective way to treat hypothalamic hamartoma is microsurgery to remove hamartoma. Under the microscope, Deputy Chief Physician Guan Yuguang successfully removed the peanut sized hamartoma in Peng Peng's brain. After the operation, Peng Peng's giggle and epilepsy symptoms completely disappeared, and he became intelligent.

Hypothalamic hamartoma is a rare brain developmental abnormality. The common clinical manifestations are precocious puberty, seizures, mental retardation and behavioral abnormalities. Its characteristic seizure form is giggle seizure, which usually occurs in infants and early children. In addition to giggle seizure, most patients also have other seizure forms, such as complex movement, absence, tonic seizure, clonic seizure, tonic clonic seizure, etc.

Guan Yuguang, Deputy Chief Physician, reminded that the smirk epilepsy seizure is characterized by local epilepsy, which is relatively mild epilepsy. Some patients may have more than ten seizures a day, which is short in duration but many times. If it has not been found for a long time and has not been effectively treated, the condition will easily worsen and develop into generalized epilepsy, and even lead to intellectual regression of children. (Cheng Dandan)