A Center for Disease Control study reported that people with seizures were more likely to have lower education levels, higher unemployment, higher levels of pain, hypersomnia/insomnia, increased psychological distress and social isolation/connection issues. Some of the issues which impact quality of life for people with epilepsy are: ability to drive and travel, the ability to date, marry and have children, the ability to have a job and independence, the ability to have an education and learn, and the ability to have good health and mental functioning. Future research is needed to find ways of not only controlling frontal lobe seizures, but of also addressing the specific quality-of-life issues that plague those with frontal lobe epilepsy, especially as studies show a higher emotional recognition anomaly in cases of FLE, compared to TLE. Driving and transportation restrictionsDriving and travel restrictions are one of the greatest limitations that epileptic patients experience. Laws restricting driving privileges vary greatly in the United States as well as across the world. In the United States, 28 states require a patient to be seizure free for fixed periods of time ranging from 3–12 months. However, research done by Johns Hopkins University showed that there was no difference in seizure-related fatal crash rates in states with 3-month restrictions versus states with 6-12 month seizure-free restrictions. In 23 states, the restrictions and seizure free periods vary depending on the type of epilepsy and the individual case and in 13 states physicians were responsible for determining whether their patients should be allowed to drive.
Originally, nitisinone was developed as a weed-killer by Zeneca Agrochemicals. It was epidemiologically observed that the growth of plants and weeds was inhibited under the bottlebrush plant (Callistemon citrinus). It became clear that neither the shade nor the litterfall of these plants was responsible for the suppression of plant and weed growth. Rather, a substance – which was identified as leptospermone – in the soil under the bottlebrush plant was shown to have bleaching activity on the emerging plants. The allelochemical leptospermone was extracted from the bottlebrush plant and chemically characterized. Leptospermone belongs to the triketone family and inhibits chloroplast development due to a lack of plastoquinone secondary to hepatic 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase (HPPD) inhibition; thus, it served as a blueprint for the synthesis of nitisinone.In 1932, Grace Medes first described "a new disorder of tyrosine metabolism," She coined the condition "tyrosinosis" after observing 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate in the urine of a 49-year-old man with myasthenia gravis. She proposed that the metabolic defect in this patient was a deficiency of 4-hydroxyphenylpyruvate dioxygenase, but her case remains puzzling and has since been assigned a separate OMIM number. The first typical patient with hepatorenal tyrosinemia was described in 1956 by Margaret D Baber at Edgware General Hospital in Middlesex, England. Starting the following year, Kiyoshi Sakai and colleagues, at the Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo, published 3 reports describing the clinical, biochemical, and pathological findings of a 2-year-old boy with hepatorenal tyrosinemia who was then thought to have an "atypical" case of tyrosinosis.