By: Lance Fogan, M.D.
Lance Fogan, M.D. is Clinical Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. His hard-hitting emotional family medical drama, “DINGS, is told from a mother’s point of view. “DINGS” is his first novel. Aside from acclamation on internet bookstore sites, U.S. Report of Books, and the Hollywood Book Review, DINGS has been advertised in recent New York Times Book Reviews, the Los Angeles Times Calendar section and Publishers Weekly. DINGS teaches epilepsy and is now available in eBook, audiobook, soft and hard cover editions.
The Gamma Knife is Focused Radiation to Treat Epilepsy Without Surgery
My followers should find this 162nd of my monthly educational blogs of interest for your own epilepsy and for those whose lives are touched by your epilepsy.
If your epilepsy is drug resistant this is a potential treatment that could benefit you and it is non surgical. Gamma knife surgery, also known as stereotactic radiotherapy, is not actual surgery. No cutting nor opening of the skull is involved. Radiofrequency beams are painlessly concentrated on the brain area identified as the cause of your epilepsy. This technique originated in the 1950’s. The Gamma Knife can minimize damage to nearby healthy brain tissue. Your seizure frequency may be lessened; your epilepsy may even be cured without opening the skull or damaging normal brain tissue.1
The Gamma Knife® is a powerful tool that enables the neurosurgeon to focus many weak beams of radiation energy on any location inside the brain, especially useful to treat areas difficult, or dangerous, to expose surgically. By focusing these intersecting individually weak beams together these many beams can break down tissue. The radiosurgery team can target a region of the brain while limiting damage to surrounding, normal brain tissue. While more commonly used to treat children with brain tumors and collections of abnormal blood vessels arteriovenous malformations, the Gamma Knife is also used to treat some patients with epilepsy.
The painless treatment effect of Gamma Knife radiosurgery occurs slowly, depending on these conditions that are often associated epilepsy:
• Benign tumors. Gamma Knife radiosurgery keeps tumor cells from reproducing. The tumor may shrink over a period of months to years. But the main goal of Gamma Knife radiosurgery for noncancerous tumors is to prevent any future tumor growth.
• Malignant tumors. Cancerous tumors may shrink quickly, often within a few months.
• Arteriovenous malformations (AVMs). The radiation therapy causes the atypical blood vessels of brain AVMs to thicken and close off. This process may take two years or more.
• Epilepsy foci. Half of epilepsy patients lack identifiable brain tissue abnormalities or scars which EEGs and brain scans identify where seizures begin. The radiation therapy can be useful in eliminating these abnormal areas.
Consider discussing Gamma Knife treatment on a brain epileptic focus your medical team has identified causing your still poorly controlled seizures with your neurologist.
1. Lunsford LD, Kondziolka D, Flickinger JC, et al: Stereotactic radiosurgery for arteriovenous malformations of the brain. J Neurosurg 75:512-524, 1991
