When is surgery recommended for the treatment of epilepsy?
For a small proportion of patients, medicines are not really going to work. For this group, some patients may a small part of the brain that is abnormal and may be causing the epilepsy and in those patients a surgical approach might be taken. We will work with the surgeons to identify the bit of the brain that is causing the problem and seek to either remove it or use radiosurgery techniques to ablate it or similar.
Surgical approaches are certainly not for everybody and of course surgery is irreversible so will always follow a process of extensive investigation. However, for patients who have a single focus causing their epilepsy, it is a genuine option and here at Queen Square, we have extensive experience of performing surgical procedures to help people with epilepsy.