Abstracts

Rationale: To evaluate the effectiveness of early surgical intervention in symptomatic epileptic encephalopathy(EE) in infancy.Methods: The authors retrospectively analyzed twenty-three infants (11 boys, 12 girls) with EE underwent epilepsy surgery in our hospital from 2001 to 2012. Surgical treatments included hemispherotomy, multi-lobar disconnection, lobar resection and corpus callosotomy.Results: The mean age at surgery was 4.9 months. Fourteen children were Ohtahara syndrome, 5 had West syndrome, and 4 had other types of EE. Etiology of all patients treated by resective surgery was malformations of cortical development. At maximum follow-up of 24-144 months (mean 66.5 months) 14 children (67%) of 21 who underwent resective surgery achieved Engel class I outocomes. All children achieved favorable seizure outocomes (Engel class I and II) showed improvement of psychomotor retardation. Postoperative developmental velocity correlated with preoperative seizure duration in seizure-free children(r = -0.49, p = 0.02).Conclusions: Early epilepsy surgery should be considered in children with symptomatic EE for improvement of both seizure and developmental outocomes.