Ho Thi Diem Huong (18 years old, Thanh An commune, Cam Lo district) has been traveling from Quang Tri to Ho Chi Minh City for epilepsy treatment since childhood. And she was able to overcome the seizures that made her daily activities and studies difficult, even hopeless.
Since the age of 3, Huong has often suffered from generalized seizures. Seizures become more frequent between the ages of three and five. When she entered primary school, the seizures were still relapsed several times a year. Between the ages of 12 and 18, the frequency of seizures falls; but, they reoccurred afterward. Now, at the age of 18, she still experiences 7-8 seizures every month.
"Every week, she often has an epileptic seizure onset suddenly, without any warning signs to prevent it. If a seizure occurs while she is riding her motorbike to school, it could be extremely dangerous. Her studies at the Buddhist school have also been negatively impacted by her epilepsy." Huong's father told about his daughter's difficulties when living with the disease for many years.
Despite numerous examinations and treatments with various medications, the epileptic seizures still persist. During her upbringing , they were always worried that something bad would happen to their daughter.
In 2022, Huong's parents sought out Dr. Truong Van Tri, head of the Functional Neurosurgery Unit at Vinmec Central Park International General Hospital, a good expert in epilepsy surgery. They expressed to Dr.Tri their hope for a bright future for their daughter.
Dr. Tri explained that the past inability to cure epileptic seizures was due to the disease's unknown cause. The epilepsy treatment team at Vinmec Central Park Hospital used the results of the brain MRI scan, the patient's seizures, and the video EEG to find out that Huong's epilepsy was caused by a fibrotic hippocampus in the right medial temporal lobe that turned into an epileptic wave generator, which led to seizures that anti-epileptic drugs could not stop.
As a prognosis, after the surgery to remove the right medial temporal lobe to remove the epileptic focus, Ms. Huong has not had any seizures for the past year. "After being discharged from the hospital for 3 days, I returned to school; my memory is better, and so far my academic transcripts have improved a lot," Huong happily shared.
Epilepsy has many etiologies, the most common of which is hippocampal fibrosis. In addition to others such as cortical dysplasia, brain tumors, sequelae of traumatic brain injury, cerebral vascular malformations, and epilepsy without brain damage. However, mesial temporal lobe epilepsy, as in Ms. Huong's case, is the type that can be cured with surgery. The success rate of treatment with this method is up to 70-80%. In many cases, after surgery, the patient no longer has seizures and has a stable life and work. But there aren't many hospitals in Vietnam that do surgery for epilepsy because the surgical team has to meet a lot of strict requirements. The neurologist has to accurately locate the epileptic focus, and the surgeon has to do very precise operations to remove the epileptic focus without hurting the blood vessels and important nerve structures that are close to it. If these structures are damaged, the patient may be paralyzed after surgery.
Vinmec Central Park is one of the private hospitals in the Southern region, which has a team of neurologists and neurosurgeons trained for many years at the University of Montreal, Canada to treat epilepsy. In addition, Vinmec Central Park is also equipped with many modern diagnostic facilities to support the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy, such as a high-resolution 3.0 MRI machine, which helps detect brain lesions well; video electroencephalogram (also known as video EEG), which can monitor the brain's electrical activity for a long time, recording images of the patient during an epileptic seizure; and the navigation system during surgery, which will help the surgeon more easily locate the epileptic focus and neighboring nerve structures. With these assistants, the team of neurosurgeons at Vinmec Central Park Hospital can accurately identify the epileptic focus, thereby achieving a high success rate in surgery for this disease in recent times.
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