This is a picture of Adam running in the 2019 Bath Half Marathon on 17 March.

A team comprising of many of his family and friends are running the 2020 Bath Half Marathon on Sunday 15th March in his memory and to raise funds for SUDEP Action. We hope that you will support us by donating to his team page or via his friends and family who are linked to his team page.

Adam died very unexpectedly on 7th June 2019. He had just completed his finals at Bath University and had returned home to prepare for a summer of travelling in South America, followed by starting a job in London with Ernst & Young.

Adam never learned the outcome of his final exams, he never got to go to South America or to start his job in London. He died on Friday 7th June just a few days after returning to the family home.

We all remain in deep shock at the loss of a much loved young man who leaves a huge gap in so many lives. Words cannot begin to express the depth of our sadness that his young and promising life was so cruelly snatched away.

So far the reason for Adam's death, despite a detailed forensic post-mortem has not been discovered. An inquest will be held in the coming months to try to determine the probable cause.

However, we do know that Adam suffered a seizure (probably a tonic clonic epileptic seizure) while travelling with friends in Thailand in July 2018. He was examined by a neurologist when he returned to the UK but the tests found no evidence of epilepsy at that time.

We have since learned that diagnosis of this condition is not straight forward and there is no simple conclusive test. We therefore expect the inquest will find that Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy (SUDEP) is responsible. This is defined as the sudden and unexpected, non-traumatic and non-drowning death of a person with epilepsy, without a toxilogical or anatomical cause of death detected during a post-mortem examination.

The UK charity SUDEP Action has given our family considerable support in trying to understand what happened to Adam as well as advice in dealing with the coroner's office and forthcoming inquest. The charity works hard to educate people with epilepsy on the risks of SUDEP, to raise awareness among professionals and to fund research into its causes.

Around half of all epilepsy related deaths are SUDEP

Please see below a couple of links for further information.

http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/early-death-and-sudep/sudep

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=716&v=Zl_G0B8EqV0&feature=emb_logo

https://sudep.org