They told a meeting of epilepsy experts that new drugs that target specific genes, or even using gene therapy to change how genes in the brain work, are now within the reach of doctors.

"The science has arrived to where we can do something about it," Dr Gerald Fischbach, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which sponsored the conference, titled "Curing Epilepsy," told reporters.

He said scientists finally were starting to understand which genes were involved in seizures, what they look like and how to design drugs to act on them.

Epilepsy affects an estimated 1 per cent of the population globally. It can be caused by faulty genes, by a blow to the head or a stroke, by a brain infection or by a tumour.

Symptoms range from the classic "grand mal" seizure in which a patient falls, convulsing, to the ground, to a barely discernible complex partial seizure, which seems to consist of little more than a temporary dreamlike state.

Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite and established the Nobel prizes, had epilepsy, as did the Russian novelist Dostoevsky.

Fischbach said about 50 genes had been identified that have an involvement in epilepsy. Just this week in the journal Nature Genetics, a team of University of Michigan scientists reported a mutated form of a gene called SCN1A, was linked with epilepsy in two French families.

Understanding the genetics can help doctors target therapies for individuals and their unique forms of epilepsy, Fischbach said. "When you identify a mechanism, then you can identify more specific therapies," he said.

This is important because, although there are two dozen drugs for epilepsy on the market, they all have drawbacks. "There isn't a single drug on the market that doesn't have serious side-effects," Fischbach said.

And doctors have identified hundreds of different epilepsy syndromes, all caused by slightly different factors.

Current drugs can affect the entire brain, but epilepsy is usually caused by a problem in a very specific and limited region, researchers told the conference.

So perhaps an implanted device, or an implant of stem cells, might be a way to treat epilepsy without causing side-effects. (Agencies via Xinhua)