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Treating Your Child’s Epilepsy With the Most Effective Treatments Available

With our eight-bed Epilepsy Monitoring Unit, epilepsy specialists with more than 45 years of experience and a Comprehensive Epilepsy Center designed from the ground up with our young patients in mind, Florida Hospital for Children is truly a destination hospital.

Patients come to us from all over the world for treatment of their epilepsy-related conditions, taking advantage of our sophisticated diagnostics and state-of-the-art technologies, including 3T MRI that allows surgeons to image the brain during surgery, increasing accuracy and improving outcomes. Our hospital is one of only a few hospitals in the nation using this highly advanced technology in treating epilepsy.

Treating Epilepsy

It’s estimated that one percent of all children born in the United States has some form of pediatric epilepsy. To serve their needs and to offer them the best hope of leading a seizure-free life, we treat the whole child – mind, body and spirit – going beyond the basics of “seizure counts” to find effective, lasting, non-surgical and surgical interventions that improve children’s quality of life while greatly reducing or even eliminating the frequency and severity of seizures.

The cause of the brain's misfirings that disrupt the normal flow of electrical signals and cause seizures can be many, from genetic variations or congenital disorders to malformations, hemorrhages, fever, infection, trauma and tumors. Because there can be so many causes, it’s important to perform extensive assessments and diagnostics to find the cause as well as to gauge the severity and frequency of the seizures. This allows us to judge the course of treatment, whether it’s non-surgical or surgical.

Non-surgical treatments can include the use of anti-seizure medications and a ketogenic diet, a high-fat and low-carbohydrate regimen that has proven to help the body produce natural anticonvulsants.

If these efforts do not adequately control the seizures, surgery may be recommended to remove the brain tissue that is responsible for causing the seizures to start or spread.

Surgical Options

The type of surgery required depends largely on the nature of the seizure itself. Epilepsy surgeons at the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center perform the following procedures to address a range of issues:

Resective surgery: If the location of seizures can be identified, resective surgery may be recommended. This allows surgeons to remove the part of the brain cortex that is causing the seizures. Approximately 50 to 60 percent of children who have this procedure no longer have seizures, and an additional 10 to 20 percent find that the frequency and intensity of the seizures are significantly reduced.

Corpus callosotomy: This is used in cases of intractable atonic/tonic seizures resulting in drop attacks or secondary generalized tonic-clonic seizures where performing a complete sectioning of the corpus callosum can stop seizures from spreading from one hemisphere to the other. In three out of four cases it stops the “drop” seizures where the child loses consciousness completely and falls to the floor, risking injury.

Hemispherectomy/ hermispherotomy: This surgery is usually recommended if the seizure is emanating from several different places in a hemisphere or in cases where the seizure is widespread, but still confined to one hemisphere. By removing the abnormal part of the hemisphere, there’s a 75 percent chance the seizures will stop and another 20 percent of children who have this procedure will find a significant decrease in the frequency and severity of seizures.

Vagus nerve stimulator: When seizures can’t be controlled with drugs alone, a small stimulator may be implanted below your child’s clavicle. A wire from the device is inserted through the neck and to the vagus nerve. The stimulator cycles on and off during the day to control seizures. A magnet can also be swiped over it at the onset of a seizure or during it to stimulate the nerve. It can reduces the frequency and severity of seizures in about 50 percent of patients.

Before any procedure is performed, the specialists at the Comprehensive Epilepsy Center will fully evaluate your child’s condition and go over the recommended course of action to ensure that the treatments for epilepsy have the desired outcome.