Surgery may be effective for epilepsy that’s hard to treat

For those epilepsy cases that have proved difficult to control, surgery may be a viable option, researchers say.

A study released this week in the journal the Lancet involved 615 patients who were suffering from refractory focal epilepsy, a type that has proved difficult to treat, even with multiple medications.

British researchers found that 52% of patients who underwent surgery for the condition remained free of seizures five years after undergoing surgery, and 47% of them remained seizure-free 10 years later.

The longer a person was seizure free, the less likely they were to relapse.

For patients who have exhausted other options in treating their epilepsy, such surgery “is appealing,” the authors write.

But that doesn’t mean surgery is a cure-all or that it’s the only reason some patients go into remission. Only 28% of seizure-free individuals had stopped taking medications as of their most recent checkup.

For more information, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s page on epilepsy.

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