r Dianne Neale, it all began during the mid-1980s when she started experiencing recurring episodes of mental confusion and abdominal pain that apparently struck at random. After two years of these episodes, she also started experiencing frequent blackouts as well. Though she had no idea of what was happening, the ultimate cause of those episodes, and the media reaction that would follow, would soon earn her a rather bizarre claim to fame.
A long-time resident of Albany, New York, the 45-year-old hospital employee's episodes baffled her family doctor and she was eventually referred to Dr. Venkat Ramani, a neurology resident at the Albany Medical Center Hospital and a prominent authority on epilepsy. Though his client appeared to be suffering from some form of epilepsy, determining what was happening in her case wasn't easy. Not only did a standard neurological fail to turn up any sign of pathology, but MRI scans of the head and electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of her brain activity show no problems either.
To try getting a better understanding of what was happening, Dr. Ramani arranged for his patient to undergo a series of video EEG monitoring sessions. Video EEG monitoring involves measurement of brain activity while simultaneously recording patient behaviour on video. This allows technicians to link EEG activity to specific changes in behaviour that might be triggering seizures. In Dianne Neale's case, it took four prolonged testing sessions before technicians discovered that seizure activity linked to her temporal lobe was consistently triggered by her listening to a video recording of a specific television show: Entertainment Tonight.
Intrigued by this discovery, Dr. Ramani and his staff carried out systematic testing to determine what it was about the recording that could be triggering the seizures. After ruling out other possibilities, including the theme music, background noise, and voices of the other members of the cast, they found that the seizures only occurred when the patient heard the voice of the show's female host, Mary Hart. Even when she listened to the voices of other female hosts on other shows, it was only hearing that one voice that seemed to act as a trigger. Though Dianne Neale was offered the option of attending behaviour therapy aimed at desensitizing her to that one voice, she declined and simply stopped watching the program instead. Since a two-year follow-up showed that the seizures were under control, this solution seemed to work just fine for her.
And that's where things might have ended if Dr. Ramani hadn't published a letter on the case in a 1991 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. Titled, "Audiogenic Epilepsy Induced by a Specific Television Performer," the letter described Dianne Neale's case in detail and presented it as a unique example of audiogenic epilepsy. Unfortunately, the bizarre elements of the case caused it to gain an unintended media following after news stories reporting on Dr. Ramani's letter spread rapidly. Even prominent comedy hosts such as David Letterman and Johnny Carson began including jokes about Dianne Neale in their monologues. Though the original letter contained no information that could be used to identify Ms. Neale, she still felt personally humiliated to hear all the humour at her expense. Not only did she feel that the jokes demeaned her, but also epileptics in general.
Finally deciding to go public about her case, she called a press conference in August, 1991, just one month after Dr. Ramani's letter came out. Blasting Letterman, Carson, and other comedians for spreading misinformation about epilepsy, she also insisted that there was nothing funny about her condition. "I want to make sure that people understand that I am not 'crazy' and that people with epilepsy are not dangerous or mentally ill but have a physical problem," she said. "It is no funnier than someone being in a wheelchair or having a heart condition."
Unfortunately, despite her attempts at educating the public about epilepsy, revealing her identity made Dianne Neale more vulnerable than ever. It also led to a bizarre incident that occurred within a few days of the press conference. According to newspaper reports, another Albany resident named Deanna Neale (no relation), later filed a complaint about two men whom she was forced to chase off her property with a rifle. The men, apparently wanting to play a prank, had brought a tape player and a video recording of Entertainment Tonight but found the wrong house by mistake. According to Deanna Neale, "they wouldn't leave so I got my rifle and made sure they left." No charges were laid.
Despite the negative publicity, there were a still a few positive developments, including a public apology from Mary Hart over the trouble Neale was experiencing due to her condition. Even the jokes subsided with time. Not that her problems were over since she was also engaged in a lawsuit over job discrimination relating to her condition. As she revealed during her press conference, her employer, a community hospital in Cobleskill, New York, had removed her from her former job as a Medicaid biller in 1988 and demoted her to a cashier position due to concerns about her epilepsy (around the time she began seeing Dr. Vermani).
According to Neale, her former job required her to talk frequently to her clients on the phone. Since this job involved frequent listening to electronic voice transmissions, her employers were apparently concerned that her condition made her especially vulnerable to seizures. She said that the demotion occurred due to an incident in November, 1988 when she accidentally offended a client, something she said occurred because she felt a seizure coming on. Though the hospital insisted that she resigned from the position voluntarily and that the incident wasn't involved with her condition, the case would later be settled for an undisclosed amount.
While Dianne Neale unusual condition would become largely forgotten with time, her name came up again in 1997 during news stories about a bizarre seizure epidemic in Japan. When an episode from the popular TV show "Pokemon" featured a scene with rapidly flashing light from a character's eyes, hundreds of children, aged three to twenty, experienced symptoms ranging from nausea to full convulsions requiring hospitalization. Though mass hysteria was initially suspected, reruns of the show triggered the same response forcing television stations to cancel the segment. Still, some medical experts in Japan expressed doubt that epilepsy could have been responsible for the epidemic.
Toshio Yamaushi, an epilepsy expert at Tokyo's Saitama University of Medicine was particularly skeptical given that similar broadcasts had occurred in the past without any problems developing. Instead, he suggested that the symptoms were due to a one-time attack triggered by optical stimulus rather than classic epilepsy. Similar problems some Nintendo video games also led to the company posting warning about possible seizures on their videos. Dr. Yamaushi urged government agencies to develop better guidelines for television program productions in future.
While audiogenic and visually induced seizures are relatively rare (at least so far), the popularity of mass media and digital devices will likely mean more cases in future. We aren't likely to see a return of the Mary Hart syndrome but, well, stay tuned.
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