ADULT EPILEPSY
CAN ADULT EPILEPSY BE TREATED WITHOUT SURGERY? ELIZABETH TRACEY REPORTS
People with epilepsy can be quite debilitated by the condition, when in spite of a multitude of medications seizures remain, and sometimes these folks aren’t candidates for surgery. Now William Anderson, a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, describes an approach that utilizes electrodes implanted into the brain itself.
ANDERSON: One of the devices that we offer for our patients is a system called a responsive neurostimulation system. One just currently completed FDA trials and basically it acts as a sort of brain pacemaker. It can listen to the brain or listen to the region of the brain you think is causing the seizure and when it has determined that a seizure is about to happen it actually shocks the brain in an effort to stop the seizure from spreading. This is a very exciting thing for us because the therapy doesn’t involve removing tissue from the brain so we’re able to actually leave all the tissue intact. :32
Anderson says the surgery is usually straightforward. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.
