In May this year Patrick said hospital staff called to say his mother, Ann, was close to death, after she had been deteriorating over several months.
“She was taken to hospital with non-stop fits and convulsions,” he told BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show.
“I got a phone call from the hospital’s medical registrar who told me they’d tried all the anti-seizure medications and they weren’t working. ‘Sorry, she’s dying’, the registrar told me. ‘Do I have time to make it?’, I said. ‘Yes, but you’ve got to leave now’ was her reply.”
When he got to the hospital in Nottinghamshire, Patrick said his mother was “totally unconscious”, suffering continuous fits and going into kidney failure.
He said he used Google’s Gemini AI tool to summarise recent medical journal articles relevant to his mum’s condition and symptoms, and then relayed it to the neurology consultant.
“I told him what I’d discovered – that the seizures were almost certainly a rare side effect of a vitamin B6 deficiency, possibly caused by her long-term carbidopa-levodopa dopamine use, which was being used to treat her Parkinson’s,” he said. Carbidopa-levodopa is a combination drug commonly used to boost dopamine levels in Parkinson’s patients.
Medical staff agreed to give Ann an intravenous supplement of vitamin B6, which appeared to stop her seizures.
“She hasn’t had a seizure since,” he said. “The next day the family and medics were all ecstatic. The neurologist was high-fiving me.”
The consultant neurologist in question, Dr Bruno Gran from Nottingham University Hospitals, said: “As an anaesthetist, Ed has a strong understanding of clinical pharmacology and his reasoning was sound.
“What we did not anticipate was the speed and magnitude of the response. Within minutes of administering vitamin B6, Ann’s seizure activity stopped.
“We are now working to raise awareness of this potential issue, beginning with changes to practice within our own team. Although Parkinson’s affects millions of people worldwide, only 14 similar cases have ever been reported. But if the insights gained from this case can help clinicians identify and prevent similar situations in the future, that would be a significant and positive outcome.”
Ann has since made a full recovery from the seizures and Patrick said her day-to-day cognitive Parkinson’s symptoms have dramatically improved.
“It’s like we’ve got mum back”, said Patrick. “It feels like we found a silver bullet. She’s sharp as a tack.
“She’s been given a really good quality of life from a solution we never even knew was there. Cognitively, it’s like she’s gone back in time five to 10 years.”
