{"id":789338,"date":"2026-10-02T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T06:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789338\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T06:00:21","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T06:00:21","slug":"surrey-man-raising-awareness-of-melas-syndrome","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/789338\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrey man raising awareness of Melas syndrome"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Melas (mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes) syndrome is a form of mitochondrial disease.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Mitochondrial disease is where a person is born with a genetic fault causing an inability to produce enough energy from the mitochondria present in cells. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A spokesperson from the Lily Foundation charity said mitochondrial disease affects about one in 4,300 people.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Melas is usually passed down through families, but not everyone will develop symptoms, and those with them can have symptoms varied in type and severity.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;There aren&#8217;t enough words to put it into play,&#8221; George told the BBC. &#8220;It&#8217;s horrible, horrific. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Something you never, ever expect as a 16\/17 year old boy &#8211; losing that sort of family instantly.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">After years of suffering with seizures and stroke-like episodes, George&#8217;s eldest brother, Mark, died in 2015 from what they later found out was Melas syndrome.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">George&#8217;s mother soon faced the same prognosis. About eight months later, she died.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Six years later, George returned from a family holiday to find out that his brother, Liam, had also died from Melas syndrome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melas (mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes) syndrome is a form of mitochondrial disease. Mitochondrial disease is&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":789339,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-789338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=789338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/789338\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/789339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=789338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=789338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=789338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}