Newswise — For more than a third of children with epilepsy, medications are not enough to control their seizures. Surgery can be an excellent option for many of these treatment-resistant patients, but not every child is a good candidate.
Fortunately, new techniques and technologies have been steadily expanding the number of children who can benefit from epilepsy surgery. Children’s Hospital Los Angeles offers a full range of these options, including one of the latest advances for pediatric epilepsy: responsive neurostimulation (RNS).
“Many patients have seizures that come from deep parts of the brain, or from motor or language regions of the brain where we can’t physically remove that tissue without causing deficits,” says neurosurgeon Jason Chu, MD, MSc, who leads the epilepsy surgery program in the Neurological Institute at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. “Responsive neurostimulation gives us another surgical option for controlling seizures, without disrupting the child’s normal brain function.”
The team began offering responsive neurostimulation last year. With RNS, a small, pacemaker-like device is implanted in the skull. Tiny leads are placed in the brain, in the precise areas where seizures are coming from.
The device monitors brain activity in those areas in a similar way as electroencephalography (EEG). But it also delivers a small pulse of electric stimulation as soon as a seizure is detected—often stopping it in its tracks.
