Early surgery tackles boy's epilepsy
WASHINGTON — The research is persuasive: When drugs don't completely control epilepsy, surgery often can — and the sooner it's tried, the better.
"Surgery used to be thought of as a last resort. Now we don't think that anymore," said Dr. Deborah Holder, a neurologist at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.
"In my perfect world, we'd take care of everybody when they're young."
A Cleveland Clinic study in the journal Pediatrics this month is among the first to examine surgery on children younger than 3, and found that even among patients that young, earlier surgery predicted a better chance of normal development.
Consider 2½ -year-old Alex Seman of Wampum, Pa. He has a condition called tuberous sclerosis that triggers epilepsy through abnormal brain growths.
Alex's father Mike managed the Pizza Hut on Cunningham Street in Butler for two years, leaving last week to work for a bookstore near Pittsburgh.
Seman said despite four medicines, his son's arms and legs would flail with seizures several times a day. Brain monitoring uncovered several dozen mini-seizures daily, too, presumably the reason his language skills were about a year delayed.
"It's like listening to your cell phone with static coming through," said Pittsburgh's
Dr. P. David Adelson, a neurosurgeon at the Pittsburgh children's hospital, who operated on Alex in early May."The goal was to cure it before he even knew he had it."The process consisted of two surgeries, each lasting about four hours."We're thinking this is going to be weeks and weeks and weeks," Seman said. "But I think his hosptial stay was 11 days total. Most of that time was monitoring."Preparation was the hardest part, Seman added. Doctors performed a sort of pre-brain surgery, implanting electrodes directly onto the surface of Alex's brain.For a week, Alex was monitored by video as those electrodes mapped the source of his seizures — and his parents went through lots of bubbles and Barney videos keeping him quiet.Weeks after doctors removed a chunk of his brain, Alex is seizure-free so far, and his parents say his perky personality has reappeared."It was really a remarkable recovery," Seman said. "Four weeks later the stitches are gone and his hair is covering up the incision. Unless you pulled his hair apart, you wouldn't even know."He's never had a stretch like this that he was sieizure free. He hasn't even had a twinge since he's been out of the hospital."Although some risk accompanies any brain surgery, Seman's wife Cathy said making the choice was easy. Medicines and special diets failed, and Alex's maturity was faltering.Since the surgery, both parents have observed signs of increased development — feeding their hope Alex will begin school with his age group."These are his developmental years, and you see him getting farther and farther behind. It breaks your heart," she said.Eagle Focus editor Sandy Marwick contributed to this story.
