I'd come across references to the amino acid, taurine, being useful in treating seizures in several books on epilepsy, though I had never met anyone who used it. A little more than a year ago I came across an article by a woman who had very good results stopping her convulsions using taurine. After reading her account I began a search for information about it and how it may affect seizures.
What I found is taurine is highly concentrated in the tissues of the brain, liver, and eyes. Insufficient quantities of taurine impedes liver function and, in cats, leads to blindness. Its role in seizures is that taurine acts to stabilize cell walls so the neurons can fire off normally. Seizures result from random firing of nerve cells. Taurine used in quantity to treat epilepsy has only one known side effect, peptic ulcers, which clear up when taurine is discontinued [1] .
My small partial seizures I still did not have under control last year, and sometimes had several a day. The symptoms ranged from panic, to sensations of foul odors, visual disturbances, memory loss, and sickness in my gut. After reading what information was available, I began taking taurine in June. About a month later my mental state and perceptions had stabilized considerably. In August my long- standing digestive distress was easing and the frequency of seizures was much less.
By September, my seizures with the bizarre perceptual distortions had all but
ceased and I was able to get my first driver's license in fifteen years. Most
often taurine is used as an adjunct to medication, not a replacement in
treating seizures. I found few epilepsy groups on the web are aware of how
effective taurine supplementation can be or have much information about it. On
the epilepsy bulletin boards I found a few others who use it, though they had little
information to share. A fair amount of study on its function and usefulness has
been going on for years.
The reader may click here for a survey of the recent biomedical literature on taurine and epilepsy.