Health & Fitness
Emory Offers New, Advanced Approaches To Treating Epilepsy
Georgia patients share how innovative treatment helped to reduce the frequency of their seizures and improve their lives.
The seizures took control about once a month, rendering Erin Gatlin-Martin unable to drive. She couldn't work, go see friends or run to the store. She was on three medications, but epilepsy and its effects still left her feeling frustrated and isolated.
"I was very dependent on my husband for everything," recalled Gatlin-Martin, a resident of the Savannah area. "He was serving as my husband and chauffeur. That was very frustrating for me. I couldn't run out to the grocery store if my child was feeling hungry and we'd run out of crackers. I couldn't do the things I needed to do to get through daily life."
Her physicians in Savannah had prescribed anti-seizure medications, which worked for a while but became increasingly less effective over time. Doctors added more pills and higher dosages but, about once a month, Gatlin-Martin still experienced seizures, which for her would involve "zoning out" and shaking while falling asleep.
"Even though I was on three pills and very high dosages, it just wasn't working anymore," she said. "That’s when we went to Emory."
What Sets Emory Epilepsy Center Apart
Gatlin-Martin was among the approximately three out of 10 patients who don't respond to anti-seizure medication and require a more in-depth level of care. Partly on the recommendation of a friend from church, she reached out to the Emory Epilepsy Center, beginning a year of driving back and forth between Savannah and Atlanta for testing.
At the Emory Epilepsy Center, a multidisciplinary conference of several specialists weighed treatment options, including surgery. Under the care of epileptologist Dr. Andres Rodriguez Ruiz, Gatlin-Martin said she learned more about her brain and her condition than ever before.
"Here was someone more interested than anyone's ever been at getting to the root of the problem," she said. "It was a huge relief for me — OK, someone really cares and wants to know what the deal is here and how we fix it."
Emory Offers More-Effective Treatment For People With Drug-Resistant Epilepsy
Epilepsy affects more than 150,000 people in Georgia. Over the years, Emory specialists have been pioneering new and more-effective treatment for people with drug-resistant epilepsy.
Terna Ityokumbul went from experiencing occasional seizures — in which he would lose awareness for about a minute — to much-more-serious focal seizures that involved falling, stiffening and jerking all over. Once he graduated from Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, he moved to Atlanta and booked an appointment with Dr. R. Edward Faught at the Emory Epilepsy Center, which identified the source of the seizures.
After consulting with Emory physicians, Ityokumbul underwent a surgery called stereotactic laser ablation, or SLA, in which a small laser probe inactivates the part of the brain playing the most obvious role in the seizures.
"It's crazy how fast the recovery was," Ityokumbul said. "The worst part of the surgery was that I had a funny-looking haircut for a few weeks."
Neurosurgeon Dr. Jon T. Willie performed the procedure on April 4, 2018. That was a Wednesday, and Ityokumbul was back at work the following Monday with only a single stitch in the back of his head. After previously suffering four to five seizures a month, Ityokumbul has experienced just one in the year since surgery.
Emory Offers Advanced Care That Improves Patients' Quality of Life
In February 2019, the Emory Brain Health Center treated a patient with drug-resistant epilepsy by using deep brain stimulation, the nation's first such treatment since commercialization of the procedure was approved last year. The minimally invasive procedure uses an implanted device similar to a cardiac pacemaker to target specific areas of the brain.
In the first two months after neurosurgeon Dr. Robert Gross performed the surgery, the patient's seizure rate declined by 50 percent, and further improvement was expected. Deep brain stimulation "has been shown to significantly reduce the frequency and severity of seizures and improve quality of life out to seven years," Gross said.
Gatlin-Martin's case required a different approach: a right temporal craniotomy for an anterior temporal lobectomy, which is open brain surgery to remove a part of the brain responsible for the seizures. On April 19, 2018, Gross performed the eight-hour surgery on Gatlin-Martin. Though Gatlin-Martin knew serious risks were a possibility, she lobbied for the more-invasive procedure because it carried a higher success rate. Despite a complication — she suffered a minor stroke during surgery — the outcome has been life-changing.