Split Brain Surgery is mainly used on people who have epilepsy. Usually, doctors do what they can to just make a few cuts of the corpus callosum. If need be, and if the seizures still continue and are severe, a lobectomy can be preformed, which is the removal of the temporal lobe, and in very young children, with severe epilepsy they can have a hemispherectomy, where they remove one hamisphere of the entire brain.
When just a few cuts are made in the corpus callosum, the patient is usually on seizure medication. Since we learned what causes a seizure, abnormalities in the neurons start to fire back and forth between the hemispheres, I wanted to see what seizure medication did to the brain to prevent it from having seizures, but I didn't really come up with an exact answer. The exact mechanism of action isn't fully understood, but anti-seizure medications appear to interfere with the overactive transmission of pain signals sent from damaged nerves. Many anti-seizure drugs work in several different ways to block pain signals from damaged nerves.
VIDEO: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/10/whats_it_like_to_have_your_bra.php
2 comments:
I know someone who was seizure free for 9 years. She was on medication for her epilepsy and then was weened off of it. Some time during the summer, she had a seizure. After that, I thought that maybe she should have stayed on the medication. I wish I knew how the medication worked too. Seizures are baffling to me.
Yeah, they're really wild. My brother is epileptic and is on medication too. He also did really well for a few years, so the neurologist tried to wean him off the medication, but sure enough, he started having seizures again. They really are so strange, and it's one of those things where you won't really be sure if there is ever a way to completely treat epilepsy.
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