Re: brain damage/ not irreparable!

[Guest guest]

Kathy,

One should not believe anything that is written in the internet. Thank God, the St. findings are obsolete, and surgery is not the first or second choice.

There is an American lady working at a VA hospital somewhere in the Eastern US, a clinical psychologist, who has done research on people with a shrunken hippocampus. The loss in mass had happened to the patients by being traumatized (PTSD). Their symptoms are memory loss and psychotic episodes and intrusions, change of personality, schizophrenia-like symptoms, sleeplessness, depression, fits of aggression, and interactions of all those, the whole row of symptoms that is very well known to people with seizures. The loss of mass (up to ten percent) can be seen in an MRI.

This clinical psychologist developped a psychotherapy (no drugs, no surgery!), only by talks to restore the patients' health and sanity, and it was visible on the MRI that the mass of the hippocampus had grown by more than ten percent.

It is definitely obsolete that brain tissue cannot heal or regenerate. And if my memory serves me right, the St.'s maintainence is obsolete since October of 1999 when other findings contradicted them directly.

What's behind this suggestion of surgery is greed for obtaining highly valuable brain tissue. The hippocampus works as the RAM of a computer should. Neuro-surgeons and computer scientists work together in this field. They do not cut that tissue out and throw it into the dust bin. Even before a surgery starts, researchers stand in line for the material, and special patients are picked, hippocampus and frontal lobe are the most desired. And the brain researchers are already standing there with an open hand to receive it.

Seizures might cause brain tissue damage. But this tissue damage is definitely NOT irreparable. There are even non-material methods to restore it (see above). Whereas surgery effects are irreparable. I would advise against surgery. Once that tissue is cut out, nobody ever will mend it back in. It takes years (and a mighty strong personality!) to recover.

AEDs do help in the first two years immeadiately after a necessary surgery (e.g. clipping of a vessel after leaching of an aneurysm), in fact at that time they are necessary to prevent szrs, but later on they might rather have a detrimental effect.

In einer eMail vom 03.11.01 00:14:29 (MEZ) Mitteleuropäische Zeit schreibt kblanco@...:

Do Seizures Cause Brain Damage?

January 21,1999

The American Academy of Neurology/MedscapeWire

ST. PAUL, MN - A new patient study indicates that seizure activity originating in a specific location of the brain causes the region to become irreversibly damaged. The study was published in the current issue of Neurology, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Researchers studied 35 patients with uncontrolled temporal lobe epilepsy whose seizures originate in the hippocampus (an area within the brain's temporal lobe that controls memory and learning). "We found that uncontrolled seizures originating in the hippocampus cause the hippocampus to shrink," said study author and neurologist Theodore, MD, of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. "Brain damage to the hippocampus could affect memory or learning." On average, patients in the study were 35 years old and had epilepsy for 23 years. Those living with uncontrolled epilepsy the longest had the smallest hippocampus. "A person living with uncontrolled epilepsy for 23 years may have as much as a 15 percent reduction in hippocampal volume compared to a person diagnosed with epilepsy for one year," said Theodore.

"Patients may prevent brain damage by properly treating their seizures early after the onset of epilepsy, said Theodore. "Most importantly, if medication is not controlling seizures, patients should seek other treatment options such as surgery."

To measure the volume of each patient's hippocampus, researchers used a 3-D magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique. Volume of the hippocampus in which seizures originate was compared to the volume of the same individual's healthy hippocampus located on the opposite side of the brain.

Not all patients will necessarily develop damage to the hippocampus, said Theodore. "It may take more than 20 years for brain damage to develop. We don't want to alarm anyone, but we do want to emphasize the importance of thorough, early treatment for seizures."

Temporal lobe epilepsy can cause a variety of symptoms. With such a seizure a patient can experience a sudden loss of responsiveness while appearing to stare motionlessly, sudden and unprovoked sense of fear, strong sense of an unpleasant odor, déjà vu, moaning or lip smacking. Epilepsy affects 2.5 million Americans and encompasses more than 40 neurological conditions that share a common symptom - seizures. top