Awareness of surgical treatment of pediatric epilepsy

  Once epilepsy is diagnosed, it should be treated early. First medication. However, there are still 20-30% of patients who respond poorly to drug therapy, i.e., refractory epilepsy, as well as a proportion of patients with imaging that identifies lesions closely related to epileptiform discharges, for whom surgery is the primary treatment. Appropriate surgery can lead to seizure control or cure of epilepsy in many patients. Currently, the most effective procedure is resection of the epileptogenic focus; hemispheric dissection is also more effective in certain children with epilepsy, but the procedure is often more invasive and risky. Other procedures, such as corpus callosotomy and vagus nerve stimulation, tend to be palliative in nature.  The selection criteria for surgery are as follows: 1) the child’s quality of life or growth is seriously affected by the seizures; 3) the child’s physical and mental status can cooperate with the preoperative evaluation; 4) the epileptogenic focus is a single lesion that is not in an important functional area of the brain, and the surgery will not cause significant disability; 5) the patient can be located by noninvasive or invasive methods. The epileptogenic foci can be localized by non-invasive or invasive methods.