Epilepsy Surgery

Epilepsy surgery is a neurosurgical treatment in which the area of the brain responsible for generating seizures is resected, ablated, disconnected from the rest of the brain, or stimulated, with the goal of eliminating seizures or sharply reducing how often they occur. About sixty percent of people with epilepsy have focal epilepsy syndromes, and in twenty to thirty percent of those cases the seizures are not adequately controlled even after fair trials of two different anticonvulsant drugs, a situation doctors call drug resistant or refractory epilepsy. Most people with epilepsy respond to one or two anticonvulsant medications, which remain the first line of treatment, but for patients whose epilepsy proves refractory, surgery is considered the only treatment that can offer a cure. The procedure has been performed for more than a century, and its use expanded sharply in the 1980s and 1990s as surgical technique improved and outcomes for carefully selected patients got better.