Rare surgery at AIIMS offers relief from epilepsy

NEW DELHI: He lost his childhood to epileptic seizures that used to leave him unconscious for hours. And when he came to, the seizures would start again, sometimes at an interval of three-four hours. But now at the age of 18, Rahul (name changed) is making up for the lost time. He is learning to read and write after a surgery performed by doctors at AIIMS cured him of the disease.
That half of Rahul’s brain which was responsible for the seizures has been removed, said Dr Manjiri Tripathi, senior neurologist and epileptologist, AIIMS, ‘‘At the time of admission, he was having as many as 100 seizures a day. We found that he was suffering from an uncommon condition called Rasmussen’s Syndrome where the entire half of the brain becomes diseased and produces multiple epileptic attacks which may extend up to few hundred a day.’’
His mother, Madhu Khanna, consulted several doctors in Alwar and Delhi, but no one could provide a definite cure. With each passing year, the frequency of the attacks increased. ‘‘He refused to go to school as he feared that he may hurt himself due to seizures. His teachers also could not manage him when he suffered an attack. Each attack left him drained out,’’ said Madhu.
Last year, Rahul was evaluated for epilepsy surgery. In an eight-hour long surgery, neurosurgeons disconnected a hemisphere — responsible for uncontrolled epileptic attacks— of his brain from the rest. ‘‘Even though the diseased brain was retained within the skull, it was not electrically connected to the rest of the brain,’’ said Dr Sarat P Chandra, associate professor, AIIMS, who has performed close to 40 such surgeries.
Explaining the procedure Dr Chandra said, ‘‘It is like a defective electrical circuit. Instead of removing defective circuit, we simply cut the electrical connections so that the rest of the normal circuitry does not fuse anymore. The blood supply to the disconnected part continues.”
Interestingly, despite doctors disconnecting half of his brain from the rest, Rahul’s body movements, speech, memory, etc, have not been affected. Doctors said this was due to a fascinating feature of the brain called plasticity.
Almost a year after the surgery, Rahul’s mother said people refuse to believe he was once confined to bed. ‘‘No one believes that he underwent such a big surgery. He is doing so well,’’ said Madhu.