Surgical treatment of post-traumatic epilepsy

  After brain injury, seizures caused by meninges, brain scarring, or foreign bodies are called traumatic epilepsy.  Immediate epilepsy: refers to individuals who have a grand mal seizure within minutes after the injury, the injury is generally mild; the cause of occurrence may be related to brain contusion, intracranial hemorrhage, local irritation of depressed bone fragments, most seizures are not repeated and the prognosis is better.  Other injuries with severe respiratory distress, cranial residues (especially metal objects), open cranial injuries without proper treatment, those with positive neurological signs, and those with concurrent intracranial infections, hematomas, and depressed fractures are prone to morbidity.  Injury procedures: the more severe the degree of brain injury and the deeper the site, the greater the likelihood of epilepsy. Statistically, the incidence of dural penetrating injuries is 5-10% higher than that of non-penetrating injuries.  Late epilepsy: refers to those who develop more than one week after trauma, with an incidence of about 5%; most occur within a year, and some after decades; the causes are related to scarring, brain atrophy, foreign body left behind, or intracerebral comorbidities. The majority of seizure types in late traumatic cranial trauma epilepsy are partial seizures, accounting for about 40%, and temporal lobe cranial trauma epilepsy accounts for about 25%. The cause is often related to meningeal brain scarring, intracerebral cysts, cerebral penetrating malformations, brain abscesses and intracranial hematomas, foreign bodies, and fracture fragments. As these lesions compress, pull, and stimulate adjacent normal or partially injured brain tissue, they cause epileptic discharges of nerve cells and result in cranial trauma seizures.  CT or MRI is the best way to diagnose epilepsy. It can reveal the site and extent of meningeal brain scarring, ventricular enlargement, deformation or distraction displacement, and EEG is the most reliable diagnostic tool. In patients with post-traumatic epilepsy, the number of seizures can gradually decrease or become milder after antiepileptic drug treatment in most patients, who can live or work normally and only need long-term medication without surgery.  Selection of epilepsy surgery cases: 1. Failure of medication, affecting the patient’s normal life; 2. Clinical EEG examination shows that the seizures are limited; 3. Removal of the epileptic focus does not affect normal function; 4. Long-term seizures, proven to be symptomatic, are caused by damage to a region of the brain; 5. No natural remission of seizures is possible.  The main post-traumatic epilepsy surgical modalities are: cortical EEG-monitored resection of the meningeal-brain scar and its adjacent to epileptic foci; anterior temporal lobe, hippocampus, and amygdala resection; multiple submural transverse fiber cuts; corpus callosotomy; and cerebral hemisphere resection.