I think I've heard it all now -- so the doctors are blaming your THREE YEAR OLD SON'S symptoms on stress???? PLEASE!!!! I want to tell you I am 40 years old and have had the very same symptoms and others for 6 years now: twitches, prickly sensations, visual problems. Ideas that have been tossed about: Lyme disease, post-infectious autoimmune syndrome, porphyria, mitochondrial disease, chronic viral infection of some unknown sort. If you want to e-mail with me my name is Maureen and my e-mail is ***@****
My heart breaks to think of a three year old with this.
I certainly understand your growing concern with your son's progression of the symptoms and its cause being attributed to "stress." I don't want to unnecessarily alarm you, but I agree that your son definitely needs to be looked at more closely and soon. First, with visual changes, he absolutely needs to see a pediatric ophthalmologist (not optometrist) for a formal exam. Second, you're right about the earliness of the tests, not that it was done too soon, but that it's very hard to interpret a young child's MRI of the brain. Although we have many talented neuroradiologists here at the clinic, we have a special one just for pediatric cases. It should be repeated with contrast and possibly metabolic SPECT (talk to your doc about this) in light of his progression. Third, continuous video-EEG monitoring in a pediatric epilepsy unit would be important as he has twitches and may have seizures.Fourth, he may need an extensive metabolic workup to look at mitchondrial and enzyme disorders.
But the most important advice I could give you is to get a second opinion. Here at the Cleveland CLinic we have several outstanding pediatric neurologists: Bruce Cohen, Neil Freidman, Gerald Erenberg, and David Rothner as well as availability of services.
Now it's quite possible that it could be an early form of migraine headache, but with his continuing symptoms we should make sure that it's nothing else. I wish you and your son the best of luck.