Epileptic Seizures May Dissipate After Brain Surgery

June 22, 2009 — -- Emma Kon, 25, made news in the United Kingdom after doctors performed multiple surgeries to remove seven parts of her brain in an effort to treat an epileptic condition which crippled her with up to 100 seizures each day.

Now, about nine months after her treatments, Kon told the U.K.'s Daily Mail that she has had no seizures and is feeling well.

While epilepsy experts say that complications from brain surgery usually occur immediately after the operation and that reduced seizure activity is a good sign that a person is in recovery, side effects of drastic brain surgery can arise unexpectedly.

And epilepsy, a disease that affects about three million people in the United States, can be a wily disease that may return without warning in a different part of the brain.

Brain surgery can be a common and successful way to treat some forms of epilepsy.

"Some epilepsies are amenable to surgery and some are not," said Dr. Emad Eskandar, director of functional neurosurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. "If we can pinpoint the source of epilepsy to one or two foci in a relatively safe area of the brain, there is a good chance of curing or significantly reducing the number of seizures with surgery."

Eskandar said the success rate of surgery to remove a portion of the brain -- and about half of patients with epilepsy have problem areas in the temporal lobes, in the center of the brain -- is about 80 percent, and patients show a reduced rate of seizures.

And removing even a significant chunk of nonessential brain tissue -- those parts responsible for bodily functions, which we could not live without -- may have no outward effect on how the patient thinks or behaves post-surgery.

"Are they neurologically OK? Yes," Eskandar said. "If a part of the brain is the seizure's focus, that means it's not working properly anyway. Either the person has a mild deficit that they have already adapted to or over time the function of that area has moved to another part of the brain."