Brain tumors tend to cause epilepsy, will epilepsy be cured by removing brain tumors?

  Brain tumors often cause seizures, and although brain tumor-associated epilepsy is associated with brain tumors, the causes of brain tumor-induced epilepsy are very complex. The epileptogenic focus that directly causes seizures also often does not coincide with the location of the brain tumor, resulting in seizures that do not necessarily disappear after brain tumor removal. Moreover, the edema of local brain tissue and glial scarring after brain tumor surgery may also be the cause of epilepsy, so even some patients with brain tumor who did not have epilepsy before surgery develop seizures after surgery.  For brain tumors with seizures, surgical removal of brain tumors needs to be combined not only with the malignancy of the tumor to prolong the patient’s survival time as much as possible, but also with the seizure situation to minimize the possibility of seizures after surgery and improve the quality of life. Depending on the type of tumor and seizures, there are also various surgical approaches for seizures in brain tumors, which need to be combined with the actual situation of brain tumors to make a reasonable choice.  The root cause of brain tumor-related epilepsy is still brain tumor, so the most common surgical procedure is brain tumor resection. This surgical procedure focuses on removing the brain tumor, thus eliminating the impact of the brain tumor on the brain tissue. With this surgical procedure, about half of the brain tumor-related epilepsy can be relieved after the surgery. This surgical approach is mostly used for brain tumors near important functional areas of brain tissue, after all, the tumor is surrounded by normal brain tissue and brain tissue with important functions that cannot be damaged.  Another surgical approach for brain tumor-related epilepsy is to locate and remove the epileptogenic foci using various means such as EEG or other surgical methods to block the propagation of electrical activity of the epileptic foci while removing the brain tumor, and in this way to try to control the seizures after surgery. This procedure is more invasive than simple brain tumor removal, but it does not completely eliminate the occurrence of post-surgical seizures. Because the brain tumor cannot be completely removed or recur, or the epileptogenic focus cannot be completely removed, or the post-surgical trauma scar and other formative epileptogenic focus, etc., even with this more damaging surgical approach, there may still be seizures after surgery. There is another kind of pure epileptogenic focus removal, which is for the case where the tumor cannot be removed and the seizures are persistent, because the cause of the tumor cannot be removed and the surgical effect is not certain, so it is rarely used.  Therefore, after surgery for brain tumor-associated epilepsy, some of the seizures can disappear, but some may continue to have seizures.