Sad news came over the weekend when John Travolta and Kelly Preston's son, Jett Travolta, passed away while on vacation in the Bahamas. At only 16 years old, Jett reportedly was found in a bathtub on Friday, Jan. 2., after suffering from a seizure and hitting his head.
At age two, Jett was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, a condition that involves swelling of the arteries, which can cause serious complications involving heart and blood vessels that supply oxygen to the heart. Kawasaki disease can cause aneurysms, which can cause fatal heart attacks. It's not clear though whether Jett's death was a result of Kawasaki disease.
To hear more about Jett's condition read more.
Jett had also been suffering from seizures his entire life, on an average of one every four days. Travolta's lawyers said, "each seizure was like a death," since Jett would convulse and lose consciousness. To prevent these episodes, Jett had been taking Depakote, a strong antiseizure medication. The stories stating that John refused to give his son the medicine because of his Scientology views are not true. The drug helped tremendously in the beginning, reducing the frequency of Jett's seizures to one every three weeks, but eventually, the drug lost its effectiveness, and Jett's seizures returned to a frequency of once a week. After consulting with neurosurgeons, Travolta and Preston decided to stop using Depakote, although there's no evidence that discontinuation of the drug caused Jett's seizure. An autopsy is scheduled for today with the hope that details on the cause of Jett's death will be revealed.
Our hearts and sympathies go out to John and Kelly's family and friends during this tragic and difficult time.
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I heard about this the yesterday.
So sad. That poor family. And on a family vacation, too.
1that's really a hard situation to be in and i think that since this is an illness that we don't hear about too much, we just don't know what to expect. i can only imagine how hard it must have been on the whole family to not know how to keep their son safe/healthy - and it's always hard when medications stop working...
my thoughts go out to the family and all their friends.
2This is sad, I give the Travolta Family my consolence, and total respect. I am myself a parent of a 2 year old daughter, and have not had that experience, but that is one of the things in life that is REALLY HARD to accept. their pain will take a long time to heal, and maybe it wont heal. I cant imagine what they are experiencing right now.
3I am not a woman, I Am a Man. I GOT CONFUSED with the profile options.
4sorry.
I feel badly for their loss. Jett seemed to be a very sweet boy but this was not Kawasaki's disease. Kawasaki's is treatable and curable, example Brian Litrell's son was just treated for the disease using IVG treatment - the have to wait approximately 6 to 8 weeks to ensure that the disease has been cured but Kawasaki's even left untreated does not cause epilepsy.
The question regarding Kawasaki's is if Jett had Kawasaki's at two years old why did his parents not pursue one of the many available cures for the disease? Why would they let it fester for 14 years? I don't think they did - I think it was something they latched onto as an "exotic" explanation for the myriad of problem the child had. The poor young man probably had severe epilepsy with other disorders such as some variation of autism which has often been mentioned when people speak about Jett.
5I complete agree Wackdoodle. I also blame scientology and its opinion on a lot of diseases. It's sad when parents' religious beliefs get in the way of medical treatment which could have greatly enhanced/saved their children's lives. Denial (lack of treatment) does not mean that your child does not have a disability.
6My prayers are with them in this difficult time.
7May God bless them.
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