Epilepsy may be a disease that is familiar to your ears. Epilepsy is a neurological condition that affects the central nervous system and generally lasts a long time. Usually, this neurological disease is characterized by repeated symptoms of convulsions, falls, or fainting even though the sufferer previously felt fine. Apart from that, there are other disorders which are also signs of epilepsy, such as impaired visual abilities, sensory and motor disturbances, and difficulty breathing during an attack of the disease. Why does this condition occur and what causes it?
Epilepsy occurs due to disturbed electrical activity in the brain. In addition to genetic factors, these brain disorders are also usually triggered by trauma or injury to the brain that occurs as a result of brain damage at birth or as a result of an accident as an adult. Then, for those who have had brain tumors or brain infections, such as meningitis, encephalitis and stroke, the risk of developing epilepsy is even higher.
There are several factors that can trigger seizures in people with epilepsy, namely lack of sleep, excessive alcohol consumption and abuse of illegal drugs. So that lifestyle should be avoided as much as possible by people with epilepsy.
To prevent and treat epilepsy, people with epilepsy can adopt a healthier lifestyle, such as avoiding stress, getting enough sleep, and taking anti-epileptic drugs as prescribed by a doctor. If these methods still cannot prevent and control the epilepsy you are suffering from, you should treat it with surgery to block the nerve pathways in the brain that cause seizures.
Maybe surgery is still considered too extreme and scary to do. In fact, treatment through surgery is more effective and guarantees long-term recovery. Moreover, now there are minimally invasive surgical techniques or minimally invasive surgery for the treatment of epilepsy which are safer with a faster recovery period when compared to conventional surgery.
The advantage of this minimally invasive surgical technique is that there are minimal risks and complications because it utilizes advanced technology so that the surgical process becomes easier and shorter. In addition, minimally invasive surgical techniques are also able to minimize incisions so that the inside of your brain becomes more protected and the recovery time is faster. Then, pain and infection will be minimal.
Before carrying out the operation, you will first be put under local anesthesia, then the surgeon will look at your brain area using special, sophisticated tools to find out where the problem is. Not all patients will experience the same epilepsy surgery procedure because the doctor will pay attention to how severe the seizures are, as well as where the cause of the seizures themselves lies. When a problem in the brain of an epileptic patient is found, the nerve pathways in the brain will be blocked.
In minimally invasive surgery, there are three types of operations performed to treat epilepsy, namely:
- Resective Surgery
This type of surgery is most often performed to control epileptic seizures. This operation is performed by removing a small area of the brain that triggers seizures in people with epilepsy.
- Corpus Callosotomy
Corpus callosotomy surgery is more often done in children who have severe seizures to help reduce the symptoms of epilepsy. This surgical procedure is usually performed by cutting the nerve tissue that connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain because this tissue can cause seizures in people with epilepsy.
- Hemispherectomy
This operation is the same as a cospus callosotomy , where the procedure is more often performed on children who have seizures due to damage to one of the hemispheres of the brain, be it the left or right side. However, this hemispherectomy is done by removing the outer layer on half of the brain of people with epilepsy.
So, those are the ways to treat epilepsy through minimally invasive surgery. Don't forget, before deciding to have surgery, you should first consult with your surgeon and change your lifestyle to be healthier after undergoing surgery so that the symptoms of epilepsy do not reappear. #LiveExcellently