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Electrical Conductivity in the Brain

Program: Diagnosis of Epileptic and Non-epileptic Spells
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Andrew Schorr:

Wow. So that confirms it. And so you have this busted blood vessel. Now, we're talking about an electrical problem. So did I hear you say that there's an iron issue too, and does that affect electrical conductivity in the brain?

Dr. Schuele:

Yes. What happened if you do a normal EEG, which is a brain wave test which had been first described in 1935, it is able to measure our brain wave activity. If you do a brain wave test on Richard you see that he has, even in his awake state before the surgery, he had sharp looking waves which stood out of his normal background coming directly from his left temporal lobe or area. So just by a regular EEG we had already some evidence that there's some abnormal electrical activity in that area, and it further supported our suspicion that he these are epileptic seizures and they're probably coming from that area.

Now, the final proof that these are epileptic seizures came when we admitted Richard to our video EEG monitoring unit, which is a specialized monitoring unit with 24 hour technology supervision with the highest standard of safety which allows us to, even in patients who only have a seizure every month or every two months, to take off their medication and in a controlled environment record some of their seizures. And if you have epilepsy even if the frequency of seizures are greatly reduced, if you take someone off medication you can with a very high percentage record a couple of seizures, even within three or four days. And that's what we did with Richard.

And when he had the seizures you could see that these sharp waves in the left temporal region we had already seen before would build up to an abnormal rhythm which would last as long as the seizures lasted and really proved that the seizures were epileptic and that they also came from that area of the brain.

Andrew Schorr:

Well, this is fascinating. What we're going to do after the break is we're going to find out how you did this surgery and what was done at Northwestern to then deal with the problem to put Richard in a much better situation. And I think, folks, I hope what you're getting out of all of this and we're pursuing Richard Newman's case study a little bit here because the man has been living with epilepsy for more than 40 years, and now he's gotten very specialized care at Northwestern, a wonderful center for epilepsy treatment, and he's doing much better.

And I think the point is here is that there are a variety of approaches, diagnostic and the art of epilepsy medicine as you're hearing from Dr. Schuele that you want to bring to bear for you so that you get the best care. So I want to hear about this surgery. What do you do nowadays to help people like Richard. This is all on Patient Power as we continue, brought to you by Northwestern Memorial hospital. It's call coming up as we continue after this.

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