 | Spanning a career of more than 60 years, Dr. Delgado-Escueta's published papers and books chart his impact as a physician-scientist in academic neurology and epileptology, primarily at UCLA and VA. Dr. Delgado-Escueta's career has been marked by many ‘firsts’ with a profound global impact on epilepsy research and care: - In 1969, he was awarded funds to establish one of the first inpatient epilepsy telemetry units because he and a student built a functional video-EEG radiotelemetry system.
- In 1972, his students were the first to separate temporal from frontal psychomotor seizures using video-radiotelemetry.
- In 1982, he published the first minute-by-minute protocol for treating status epilepticus.
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And well before it was a popular notion and for which he was often criticized, he was among the first to emphasize that epilepsies are genetic molecular diseases that can be cured. To that end, since the 1980s, along with his students and collaborators, Dr. Delgado-Escueta has applied biochemical genetics and genomics to search for epilepsy genes.
Their discoveries of rare variants of JME genes and Lafora disease genes provide proof that epilepsies are inherited diseases. His collaborative work continues with the Lafora Epilepsy Cure Initiative and GENetics of the EpilepsieS (GENESS) to find cures for Lafora epilepsies and drug-resistant JME, respectively.