Columbus, OH,
15
February
2018
|
16:37 PM
Europe/Amsterdam

Columbus Dispatch: New Local Option For Epilepsy Patients

Surgical Procedure Is Less Invasive, Shorter Recovery, And Showing Promise

Imagine a life where you never know when you will have a seizure, and taking more than a dozen pills daily to try and keep things at bay.

That was the reality for 28-year-old Kayla Darnell of Whitehall.

Trying anything she could, she learned of a newer procedure offered in central Ohio for adults at only one place, OhioHealth.

The procedure is called SEEG, or stereoelectroencephalography.

“When we used to talk to patients about surgery, it almost always involved taking the skull off and a major brain surgery. It was very scary, and a lot of people shied away from that,” Dr. Emily Klatte, a neurologist at OhioHealth told The Columbus Dispatch. “Patients are more open to pursuing this. The hope of all this is to be able to offer minimally invasive treatment approaches to everybody.”

The procedure consists of drilling small holes into the skull and running electrodes deep into the brain. From there, doctors and surgeons try to pinpoint exactly where in the brain the seizures are happening. With that knowledge, surgeons can use a laser to try and stop the seizures from attacking that portion of the brain.

Dr. Klatte and OhioHealth neurosurgeon Dr. Girish Hiremath traveled to Italy to learn more about the SEEG technique and brought that knowledge back to central Ohio and OhioHealth.

Kayla is showing some very promising signs, seizure free since the surgery.

“It’s a lot more palatable to patients, and so patients who would never consider brain surgery and would rather live lives devastated by their epilepsy are now thinking twice and considering this,” Dr. Hiremath told reporter JoAnne Viviano.

With 1 in 26 people developing epilepsy at some point in their lives, and 3-million living with it now, Dr. Klatte says this procedure could be a significant breakthrough to try and get people seizure free and avoid invasive surgeries that require long recovery times.

“If we’re going to do surgery or ablation, we don’t want to take out the wrong area of the brain,” Klatte told The Columbus Dispatch. “The patients are going through a major procedure, and if we don’t get it right, they’re going to continue to have seizures.”

To read the article from The Columbus Dispatch, just click on the logo.

To learn more about neuroscience at OhioHealth, click here.