Epilepsy Program

Epilepsy Surgery

Manuel Campos. Neurosurgeon, Chief of Epilepsy surgery program Clinica Alemana, Santiago de Chile, in his support to the epilepsy surgery program in El Salvador. May 2007.

“The surgical treatment of epilepsy has as an objective, eliminate epilepsy once and for all (curative surgery) or alleviate the magnitude of symptoms by reducing the frequency of seizures (palliative surgery). At the present time, epilepsy surgery is only contemplated in patients that are or become “drug-resistant” this is to say, patients that take the maximum dose of anti-seizure medicine and keep presenting seizures that do not allow him or her to carry a normal life.”

What types of epilepsy are there?

There are many kinds of epilepsies, but in a nut shell there are primaries (whose cause cannot be found) and secondary (whose cause can be explained by either a tumor, scar, vascular malformation or another lesion in the brain). Both of these epilepsies can either respond or not to pharmacological treatment. 70% of those that do not respond to medicine can have a pathology in the temporal lobe, especially one that is known as temporal lobe mesial sclerosis.

How effective is epilepsy surgery?

As stated before surgery is only contemplated in those patients that do not respond well to medicine either being primary or secondary seizures its main objective is not to eliminate the structural alteration that the brain might have, but to eliminate the circuit responsible for the seizures. If an alteration is detected in the temporal lobe and video-electroencephalogram shows epileptic activity during a seizure and while the patient is in its non convulsive state, arising from the site the lesion was detected, the effectiveness of surgery can be as high as 80%.

What type of epilepsy surgery does the Hospiales de Diagnñstico offer?

Through its Epilepsy Program the Instituto de Neurociencias de El Salvador has operated patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (the most frequent one and the one with the best results), starting 2009 invasive studies with deep cerebral electrodes will allow the complete up-to-date treatment of epilepsy surgery.