Epilepsy – Treatment Plan Testing

Transcript

There are a lot of studies that we do to help localize or understand someone’s seizures. And often we use those though when we’re more trying to specifically design a treatment plan for somebody who’s not responding like we want. So for instance, a pet scan we use quite a bit, but it’s when we’re trying to decide if someone’s a candidate for epilepsy surgery, we’ll do a pet scan. And what we see with a pet scan is we see the metabolism of the brain and how actively the brain is metabolizing glucose usually. And in areas of the brain where the seizures occur or originate from, that area can be hypometabolic. And so again, what would I’m thinking about often in those cases is can I detect exactly where the seizures coming from and define an area that we could potentially remove to stop seizures.