Implantable Prosthetic Could Help Prevent Epileptic Seizures

Interesting and perfectly understandable in their approach.

My read on this is that it will only help a small segment of seizure disorders, at least in its current form. This is pretty invasive and relies on the ability to stop a seizure using a few key neurons. Unfortunately, not all seizures initiate in the same exact region of the brain. Some do, but not all progress or cascade through the same set of neural networks.

Some important things to consider is that diet, exercise, and quality sleep go a long way in may patients.

Phenobarbital is usually the first drug of choice, but has its own share of undesired effects.

In extreme cases surgery to remove or isolate ischemic portions of the brain have been used. Perhaps the stimulation treatment in the linked article will help some of these cases. I have known of patients that have died due to either status epilepticus (persistent or concurrent seizures of greater than 5 minutes) or something called ictal bradycardia where the seizure causes the heart to arrest. Normally, arresting the heart will cause a blood pressure drop and stop the seizure, but in some cases the seizure does not allow the heart to restart and the patient dies.

Advances such as the linked article should be a step in the right direction to possibly curb some of these extreme conditions.