"This is the first clinical trial in the United States of this promising treatment for epilepsy," says Paul DesRosiers, M.D., assistant professor of radiation oncology and the principal investigator of the IU School of Medicine trial. "As many as 10 patients will be treated at IU in this trial which is designed to determine the most effective radiation dose for eliminating the seizure focus in the brain."
Currently, the only approved treatments involve medication or invasive surgery. This new radiosurgery protocol uses the Gamma Knife to focus 201 beams of gamma radiation on the precise location of the brain responsible for the seizures.
When the beams converge, the targeted area of the brain receives a full-treatment dose of radiation. Gamma Knife radiosurgery spares healthy areas of the brain from high-dose exposure to gamma radiation.
Patients over the age of 18 with a specific form of temporal lobe epilepsy, who would otherwise be candidates for the traditional surgery, are eligible to participate in this clinical trial. It is estimated that up to 1 percent of the U.S. population has epilepsy and that 20 percent of those patients have the type of epilepsy that may benefit from surgery. The surgery, for patients with seizures stemming from one temporal lobe of the brain, is up to 95 percent effective.
"The IU Comprehensive Epilepsy Program is the only one in Indiana dealing with these extreme cases," says Vincenta Salanova, M.D., associate professor of neurology and co-director of the program. "More than 500 patients have been evaluated in the clinic and, of those, 300 have qualified for surgery. As many as 90 percent of these patients became seizure free or had rare seiz
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Contact: Mary Hardin
mhardin@iupui.edu
317-274-7722
Indiana University
3-Jun-2002