My four-year-old child suffers from what our GP calls absences. He is very reassuring about this and tells me that it is likely to be resolved during adolescence. He has prescribed medicine and all now seems well. Is the doctor’s optimism justified?

Yes. Absences used to be known as petit mal attacks. A child loses consciousness for about ten to 20 seconds and his or her eyes flutter, but it is unusual for the child to fall down. Instead, the child stops, stands and stares for a few moments.In only five in a 100 children who suffer from an absence does the patient fall over.

Surprisingly, absences often occur when the child is sitting still and are relatively infrequent during vigorous exercise. During an attack, which usually occurs several times a day, a child may drop something, stop whatever he is doing and, once the attack has passed, uncannily, carry on where he left off. Unlike other forms of epilepsy, it is not preceded by any aura or warning symptoms, and the seizure is not followed by an excessive desire to sleep. It is unusual for absences to follow a head injury and they are not associated with mental retardation. In fact, many children with absences are highly intelligent. Most absences respond well to simple treatments.

The excellent BBC drama The Lost Prince, about the life of Prince John, King George V’s youngest child, was of concern to the parents of children who suffer from one of the more serious types of epilepsy. Prince John’s exact diagnosis wasn’t described in the film and may, indeed, never have been decided.

Experts with whom I discussed the film said that the type of epilepsy from which he suffered wasn’t obvious from Stephen Poliakoff’s television drama. His epilepsy began at about 12 months when the Lennox-Gastaut syndrome is usually first manifest. But his symptoms didn’t seem to be quite right for this. In this condition, the child suffers frequent spasmodic attacks that result in multiple falls as well as absences. It is associated with mental handicap. It is a severe form of epilepsy that is difficult to treat.

The good news is that the first antiepileptic drug for children has been introduced – Inovelon rifinamide, developed by Novartis and marketed and developed by Eisai Europe. It reduces by a third the number of seizures among those with the more disabling forms of epilepsy. The number of attacks in patients with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome has fallen by 40 per cent.