KMBC 9: Overland Park mom helps girl in Gaza with same rare disease as her daughter
By Jamie Weiss
Five-year-old Dallas Duval is what her mom calls a chatterbox. During our interview with mom Izzie, Dallas made sure to show us all of her favorite toys like any 5-year-old would. But Dallas is not like all girls her age.
"Dallas has a lot of special things about her," Izzie Duval said. "She is creative, she is silly and she loves to sing. She also has a couple of ultra-rare diagnoses; she has something called alternating hemiplegia of childhood."
Alternating Hemiplegia of Childhood, or AHC, is incredibly rare, impacting one in every million children.
"In the vast majority of the children who have it, It's a very painful condition," Dr. J.B. Le Pichon, a Pediatric Neurologist at Children's Mercy Hospital and Dallas' doctor. “It's a disorder that causes some very painful what are called dystonia. Dystonia is like a cramp. So when you have a cramp, if you've ever had a cramp, you know what a dystonia feels like. Now imagine that affecting half or your entire body and going on for minutes to hours or sometimes even days. These episodes of dystonia can be extraordinarily painful, and in alternating hemiplegia of childhood in AHC, they alternate with episodes of hemiplegia hemiplegia, meaning a paralysis of half of the body. So all of a sudden, half of the body becomes limp.”
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