AI Helps Find the Missing Clue That Stopped a Mother’s Seizures

A UK anaesthetist used an AI tool to identify a vitamin B6 deficiency that hospital doctors had not found, and his mother’s seizures stopped almost immediately after she received the vitamin. Ann Patrick had been told she had only hours left to live.

Edward Patrick works as an anaesthetist with the NHS in Oxfordshire. His mother, Ann, is 70 and has Parkinson’s disease. In May this year, she began having repeated seizures and was admitted to Queen’s Hospital. Doctors could not determine what was causing the fits, and her condition kept deteriorating.

At 4 a.m., the hospital called Edward. His mother was critically ill, and the caller said she had only a few hours left. He got into his car and set off from Oxfordshire toward Nottingham, where she was being treated.

A message on the road

While he was driving, Edward received a message from his brother. His brother suspected that their mother might have a vitamin deficiency. Edward took the idea seriously and turned to technology for answers.

He entered his mother’s symptoms, medical test results and scan details into an AI tool and asked it to analyse everything. The tool suggested that a vitamin B6 deficiency could be behind the seizures. It also pointed to a possible link between her Parkinson’s medication and her vitamin B6 levels.

It was a lead that no one else had put on the table. Edward did not take the AI’s output as a diagnosis. He treated it as a specific, testable question he could bring to the people who could act on it.

The fits stopped

Edward passed the information to the medical team caring for his mother. Doctors reviewed what he sent and gave Ann vitamin B6 directly into her bloodstream, intravenously. Her seizures stopped almost right away, and her condition changed in a way that mattered.

For Edward, the reversal felt unreal. He has said that he still finds it hard to believe what happened, and that he is amazed each time he tells the story.

Every time I tell this story, I am amazed that it really happened. Seeing my mother come back from the edge of death was incredibly emotional for me.

A second danger in hospital

The threat did not end with the seizures. While Ann was being treated, she developed rhabdomyolysis, a serious condition in which damaged muscle tissue breaks down and releases substances into the blood. Those substances can harm the kidneys.

Doctors identified the medicines used to control her fits, along with physical exertion, as contributing causes of the condition. It was a second serious problem that her care team had to manage while she was still critically ill.

What the case shows

Ann’s health has since improved. According to her son, she did not have to be readmitted to hospital after her treatment. Her recovery is a rare outcome for a patient who had been given such a grim prognosis.

The episode also shows how a deficiency that looks minor can lead to a life-threatening emergency. Vitamin B6 is easy to overlook, yet in this case it sat at the centre of a crisis that doctors had struggled to explain.

Most of all, it shows the difference that the right information, delivered at the right moment, can make. The AI tool did not replace the medical team. It gave a family member a precise idea, and that idea gave the doctors a direction they needed. In a moment when the clock was running out, that was enough to change what happened next.

For a family that was told to prepare for the worst, the outcome is a story of survival. For anyone watching how AI is entering the clinic and the home, it is a reminder that technology can sometimes help people ask the question that saves a life.