Epilepsy Surgery Case Studies and Commentaries
Editors: Kost Elisevich and Brien J Smith
OK, I can hear you thinking, what’s a nice GP like you doing reviewing a book about epilepsy surgery? Well - even we cynical pen-pushing prescription purveyors like to get our teeth into some serious medicine once in a while! A GP will probably have one or two difficult-to-control patients with epilepsy on his list. No matter how their drugs are adjusted, or whether they are taking two, three or four anticonvulsants, their days and lives are blighted by frequent seizures. Epilepsy, of course, is not merely an embarrassing inconvenience; it carries a very real risk of serious injury during a seizure or even sudden death. This book explores the role of surgery in the treatment of pharmacologically resistant epilepsy.
Bearing in mind the asking price, I suppose this book would be of most interest to the Neurosurgeon and Neurologist but the General Practitioner will be impressed by how far this particular field of Neurosurgery has progressed and by how much a patient with intractable epilepsy can be improved. The book centres on numerous case studies as the title suggests. In each study, an account of the patient’s seizure disorder is followed by results of detailed investigations and the reader is introduced to ECoG (or electrocorticography), which is an invasive technique designed to determine the exact location of the epileptic focus. Crucially, it is vital not to interfere with other important functions e.g. speech and language during a resection and these must be mapped and taken into account before surgery. In each case, precise operative details and post-operative progress are then discussed.
What is also particularly interesting to the GP, is the diversity of presentations of seizure disorder. Unfortunately there are obvious limitations to presenting these with still monochrome photographs although the descriptions given are excellent. As befits a book of this nature, each chapter is followed by a list of references and the index allows the reader to quickly locate a point of interest. A fascinating but somewhat expensive read, recommended to the neurosurgically curious.
| Publishers: | Lippincott Williams and Wilkins
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| ISBN: 0-7817-1727-2
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| Reviewer: | Dr Jeremy M Sager
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| Month of review: | November 2002
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