Hyderabad: Despite proper diagnosis and appropriate treatment, remission of epilepsy continues in 80 per cent of the patients, stated experts on International Epilepsy Day observed on February 8.
Epilepsy is a disorder of the brain whereby the patient suffers from seizures due to neurobiological, cognitive or psychological reasons.
The most common risk factors which are preventable and can be controlled are head trauma, poor neonatal care and infections caused due to pork tapew-orm and eating of soiled or infected food.
Senior neurosurgeon Dr Radha Krishna explained, “The most common cause of epilepsy in the younger patients is infections. That can be due to worms, infected food and even tuberculosis in the brain. These are cases where continuous treatment of two to three years helps in full cure of the disease. But the problem is that patients stop the medicines once they are fine and do not complete the full course. This half treatment is a major cause of recurrence of fits.”
Incomplete treatment is found to be one of the major reasons for re-occurrence of fits and it requires prolonged and aggressive treatment for cure. In these cases the dosage of drugs requires to be increased. Despite that if there is no improvement than surgery is suggested.
Dr S Afshan Jabeen, associate professor in department of neurology at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences explained, “Patients who have been on high dosage of drugs and continue to get fits suffer from medically refractory epilepsies. This has been found in 30 per cent of the cases. Surgery depends on the age of the patient and the also the aggressiveness of the disease.” In India the prevalence rate of the disease is one per cent of the population and at any given point of time there are four lakh people suffering from active epilepsy in both the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The prevalence is more in urban areas than in rural areas.
While 75 per cent of the patients opt for treatment in urban areas, 90 per cent of the patients in rural areas neglect the treatment. Various cultural beliefs, stigma, poverty and poor health delivery infrastructure are some of the major reasons why these patients do not make it to the healthcare establishments. Dr V Padma, neurologist explained, "Many of the families do not even know that it is a disorder and can be controlled with biomedical treatment. The treatments are highly cost effective and it is important to raise awareness about the disease."
