Public release date: 6-Mar-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Mark Wheeler mwheeler@mednet.ucla.edu 310-794-2265 University of California - Los Angeles
While the thought of any type of surgery can be disconcerting, the thought of brain surgery can be downright frightening. But for people with a particular form of epilepsy, surgical intervention can literally be life-restoring.
Yet among people who suffer from what's known as medically intractable epilepsy, in which seizures are resistant to drugs, only a small fraction will seek surgery, seeing it only as a last resort. As a result, they continue to suffer seizures year after year. They can't drive, they can't work and they lose cognitive function as the years pass. Premature death is not uncommon.
But a multi-center study led by researchers at UCLA shows that for people suffering from intractable temporal lobe epilepsy, the most common form of intractable epilepsy, early surgical intervention followed by antiepileptic drugs stopped their seizures, improved their quality of life and helped them avoid decades of disability.
The report appears in the March 7 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
"In short, they got their lives back," said Dr. Jerome Engel, the study's principal investigator and director of the UCLA Seizure Disorder Center.
But the frustration of Engel and his colleagues is this: Few patients are referred to them for surgical evaluation, and those who are have had epilepsy for an average of 22 years.
"By then, it's often too late," he said. "These people will likely remain disabled for life."
Epilepsy is a brain disorder that produces sudden and repeated seizures that last from a few seconds to several minutes. Seizures are brief attacks of altered consciousness, muscle control or sensory perception. During a seizure, some brain cells behave abnormally, firing repeatedly. This usually begins with a small group of cells and spreads to involve a larger area of the brain.
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Surgical treatment for epilepsy should not be viewed as a last resort, study shows