| Deep Brain Stimulation for Controlling Refractory Epilepsy:a Clinical Perspective |
| Woo Jun Kim, and Young-Min Shon |
|
|
|
| Copyright © 2012 The Korean Society of Clinical Neurophysiology |
| This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited. |
| ABSTRACT |
|
Epilepsy has continued to provide challenges to epileptologists, as a significant proportion of patients continue to sufferfrom seizures despite medical and surgical treatments. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has emerged as a new therapeutic modalitythat has the potential to improve quality of life and occasionally be curative for patients with medically refractoryepilepsy who are not surgical candidates. Several groups have used DBS in drug-resistant epilepsy cases for which resectivesurgery cannot be applied. The promising subcortical brain structures are anterior and centromedian nucleus of the thalamus,subthalamic nucleus, and other nuclei to treat epilepsy in light of previous clinical and experimental data. Recently tworandomized trials of neurostimulation for controlling refractory epilepsy employed the strategies to stimulate electrodes placedon both anterior thalamic nuclei or near seizure foci in response to electroencephalographically detected epileptiform activity.However, the more large-scale, long-term clinical trials which elucidates optimal stimulation parameters, ideal selection criteriafor epilepsy DBS should be performed before long. In order to continue to advance the frontier of this field, it is imperativeto have a good grasp of the current body of knowledge. |
| Key words:
Deep brain stimulation, Intractable epilepsy, Anterior thalamic nucleus |
|
|
|
PDF Links
Download Citation 
Print 
