Epilepsy, called a hidden disability, could affect a person in various ways, if not checked with treatment.
The neurological disorder carrying a social stigma with it had been a field of much medical research and it has provided severe epileptic patients other therapeutic measures, too, where medicines have failed to be effective, said neurologist B. Rajendran, Editor, Epilepsy India, a newsletter brought out by Indian Epilepsy Association and Indian Epilepsy Society.
Awareness about the epilepsy, some of the new methods and effective management are among some of the issues that took centre-stage on National Epilepsy Day observed on Monday
Characterised by seizures, epilepsy is actually abnormal electrical activity in the brain.
About 70 per cent of epilepsies can be controlled with medications, though there are a worrisome 30 per cent where the first line of epileptic drugs does not work well.
It is quite possible that if patients do not respond to the first and second line of drugs that they may be resistant to the third line drug too, said Dr. Rajendran. It is in such patients that other therapeutic measures like surgery or the now accepted ketogenic diet are prescribed.
For surgery, the epileptogenic zone in the brain needs to be identified and this zone has to be easily accessible, too.
In patients if the epileptogenic zone is rather diffused, they can take recourse to ketogenic diet route. It is a diet high on fats, adequate protein and low on carbohydrates. It works on the principle that if carbohydrates, which are the source of energy, are not available, the liver breaks down fat into fatty acids and ketone bodies, which replace glucose as the source of energy in the brain cells.
In a relatively new research area, the vagus nerve, one of the 12 nerves arising from the brain, which takes a long and superficial route down has been found accessible for implanting a pacemaker to stimulate it.
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Newer therapies for epilepsy treatment