Don't be afraid of epilepsy, talk about the treatment of epilepsy

Epilepsy, commonly known as "epilepsy", is a common neurological disease. Children and the elderly are two groups that are prone to epilepsy. About 50 million people in the world suffer from epilepsy. From the pathogenesis of epilepsy, epileptic seizures are caused by abnormal discharges of nerve cells in the brain, which is like a short circuit in the wires. Discharges occur in local brain areas or the entire brain in a short period of time, eventually leading to the manifestation of epileptic seizures in the human body (line failure).

Drug treatment for epilepsy

So how to treat epilepsy? The preferred method is oral anti-epileptic drugs. In most cases, the use of one or two anti-epileptic drugs can control epilepsy and prevent epilepsy from occurring again. It should be noted here that epilepsy drugs must be taken under the guidance of a physician, and medications must not be reduced or stopped without authorization. Moreover, some patients tend to believe in folk prescriptions and think that Western medicines have side effects, so they don't take them. But in fact, many folk prescriptions and Chinese medicines are mixed with Western medicine ingredients. The so-called no side effects are just a cover for scammers, so you must receive systematic treatment in a regular hospital.

Surgery for epilepsy

In addition to patients who can control epilepsy by taking medicine, there are still some patients (about 1/3 of the number of epilepsy patients) who still have epileptic seizures after adequate anti-epileptic treatment. For these patients who still cannot control epileptic seizures after taking epilepsy medicine, they suffer from drug-resistant epilepsy. For these patients, surgery can be used for treatment.

The method of surgery is determined by the specific situation of the patient. If there are clear intracranial lesions that can cause epilepsy (such as tumors, softening foci, cortical dysplasia), resective surgery can be used for treatment. Here we still assume that the brain is a set of sophisticated and complex circuits. A brain with lesions is like a node that has been detected to cause a clear short circuit in an electric grid that frequently experiences abnormalities. Maintenance personnel should repair that node, while neurosurgeons will remove the corresponding lesions. Due to the high postoperative cure rate of resective surgery, if there are clear intracranial lesions, even if the disease can be controlled by drugs, epilepsy surgery can be chosen, so that the drug can be stopped in the future to achieve the goal of completely curing epilepsy.

If there is no clear lesion in the brain or it is not suitable for resection surgery, there are ways to relieve symptoms. One way is corpus callosotomy. The corpus callosum is a nerve fiber that connects the two cerebral hemispheres. Cutting it can also relieve epilepsy symptoms. Another way is neuroregulation. The most common one is vagus nerve stimulator implantation. This is a minimally invasive treatment method. A stimulator is implanted in the neck and chest to stimulate the vagus nerve in the neck. The vagus nerve can reach up into the skull, and stimulating it can play a regulatory role. It is like an electronic drug that can make the brain relatively inert and no longer prone to abnormal discharges.

Although it is regrettable that the proportion of patients who can achieve epilepsy-free status after receiving the above two methods is relatively low, it can help relieve epileptic seizures and improve the quality of life of patients, so it also has important positive significance for the treatment of epilepsy patients.