Laser surgery for some difficult cases of epilepsy, treatment recently pioneered at Texas Children’s Hospital, is being extended to adults in
Houston.
Dr. Amit Verma, of Methodist Hospital, performed the minimally invasive surgery last month on a 48-year-old Houston-area woman who has been seizure-free since. The procedure was the first of a 10-patient clinical trial planned at Methodist.
In addition, Dr. Nitin Tandon, a neurosurgeon at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, said last week he hopes to use the technique on an adult with epilepsy in about four weeks. He said he’d like to do 10 to 15 laser surgeries a year as part of a trial.
The activity follows a Texas Children’s announcement in July that they have successfully treated six children with lesions in hard-to-access regions of the brain with laser surgery, a technique used in brain cancer but never in epilepsy. In the procedure, doctors insert a laser probe through a hole in the skull with the diameter of a pen and burn the lesions.
3 million with disorder
Conventional surgery for epilepsy, in which doctors remove a bone flap from the skull and cut through delicate areas of the brain, commonly causes serious complications.
Epilepsy is characterized by seizures, strong surges of electrical activity that affect part or all of the brain, often resulting in convulsions or loss of consciousness.
About 3 million people in the United States have some form of the disorder, and medication doesn’t stop the seizures in about a third of the cases. An MRI must show clearly defined lesions for someone to be a candidate for laser surgery.
Following Texas Children’s work, a doctor at Emory University Medical Center in Atlanta did the first two laser surgeries for epilepsy in adults.
