New technology at OU Children’s reduces or eliminates seizures before they start
New technology at OU Children’s Hospital can help reduce or eliminate seizures through surgery and it’s all with a small device that gets implanted in the brain.
OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) - New technology at OU Children’s Hospital can help reduce or eliminate seizures through surgery and it’s all with a small device that gets implanted in the brain.
One family said the procedure has their young son feeling better than ever.
"We can be outside in public and he feels comfortable with it, he feels confident about himself,” Johanna Aguilar said about her son Leniel.
Aguilar sat next to her 16-year-old son Wednesday about a year after a surgery that they said changed his life.
"I feel better than ever, actually,” her son Leniel said.
The procedure was the first of its kind in Oklahoma. Doctors took what’s called a neuro pace device and implanted it in Leniel’s brain.
"It's a pacemaker for the brain,” Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at OU Health Dr. Andrew Jea said.
It detects the brains signals and specifically looks for signals that show an epileptic seizure is about to start. Seizures are something Leniel and his family have dealt with since just after he was born.
"Which meant scaring me as a kid,” Leniel said. “I would always have been calling up my parents and they would almost have to come to my school every day to pick me up."
"You're always expecting a call,” his mom Johanna said.
This device sends a signal to the brain to stop the seizure before it starts. Jea said that the original treatments for this included surgeries to remove the portion of the brain causing the seizures and could lead to fears of complications.
"This is a more minimally invasive type of surgery and allows our surgeons, our teams to go to places that they couldn't reach before in the brain,” he said.
When other medications and surgeries wouldn’t work, Leniel’s family turned to this one. They said seizures now appear to be a thing of the past.
"The healing and the changes, as you see after the surgery, it's amazing,” Johanna said.
The family said it was scary at first, discussing the surgery and implanting a device in their sons brain, but Leniel hasn’t had a seizure since the procedure.
The surgery takes a few hours right now, but Jea said as doctors continue to do it they think that time will go down. The procedure also works with adults.