Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation technique brings new hope to epilepsy patients

  It is known that there are about 9 million patients with epilepsy in China, most of whom live in remote rural areas, so patients who forgo the opportunity for electrode placement and further resection surgery for financial reasons usually have only one way out with medication adjustments. Fortunately, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) offers new hope for such patients.  Yang Yang (pseudonym), 14 years old, had seizures for no reason in 2007, so she took oral Depakene under the guidance of her doctor and was seizure-free until 2011, but seizures reappeared during the process of drug reduction and discontinuation, and the frequency of seizures increased day by day in the past year, and a new form of seizures appeared, sometimes seeing black shadows flashing in front of her eyes before the seizures, adding The seizures still could not be controlled and persistent status epilepticus appeared after the addition of 5 drugs such as Kaipuran, Levetiracetam, Tolte, Phenytoin sodium and Clonazepam. After arriving at the Department of Neurology of Sanbo Brain Hospital, combining seizure symptomatology, EEG, MRI and PET-CT results, it was judged that the patient’s epileptogenic area was located in the left occipital lobe and surrounding brain regions with high possibility. After 10 times of rTMS treatment combined with medication adjustment, the patient’s seizures completely disappeared.  According to the epilepsy expert from Sanbo Brain Hospital of Capital Medical University, this patient has occipital lobe epilepsy, and the location of the epileptogenic zone is relatively superficial, which can obtain effective suppression of epileptic discharge after rTMS treatment combined with antiepileptic drug adjustment. For patients with epileptogenic zones located on the surface of the brain, rTMS low-frequency stimulation of the epileptogenic zone combined with antiepileptic drug adjustment treatment can be chosen to achieve seizure control. In addition, it has been shown that the cortical excitability of antiepileptic drugs can be detected by rTMS technique, which can be used as a predictor of the efficacy of antiepileptic drugs.