SFVA: Epilepsy Center of Excellence
Seizures are more common than you think. About 1 in 26 Americans will experience a seizure sometime in their lifetime. Epilepsy is diagnosed when individuals have two or more seizures due to electrical abnormalities in their brain. However, seizures aren’t always that characteristic severe convulsion pattern you may have seen in movies. There are many different clinical presentations of seizures, so epilepsy can be difficult to diagnose. During our visit to the SFVA Epilepsy Center of Excellence with Dr. John Hixson, we learned more about the background of epilepsy, how it is diagnosed, and how it can be treated.
To begin our visit, Dr. Hixson reviewed the disease state fundamentals with us before we moved into the discussion of what the current gold standards of care are for epilepsy. During our discussion, we went further in depth into which areas could be improved. After our discussion, Dr. Hixson gave us a tour of the inpatient portion of the Epilepsy Center of Excellence so we could get a better sense of the devices and care available for epilepsy patients.
Overall, we focused on the devices that are used to diagnose and treat epilepsy. One of the many insights we gained out of this discussion is the importance for proper seizure count in patients, as patients have a difficult time self-reporting their seizures. This information is critical in determining how effective a treatment is for a patient and for better understanding epilepsy. Additionally, we learned how the gold standard of an electroencephalogram (EEG) for seizure diagnostics still has many disadvantages that have proven difficult to overcome despite years of research in the field.
