[WEB SITE] New Device to Control Seizures Offered Regionally Only at Albany Med

06/10/2015 21:12:00ALBANY, N.Y.

— Albany Medical Center is offering a new device designed to help control seizures in patients with epilepsy by detecting a sudden increase in heartrate.

The AspireSR ,vagal nerve stimulator, similar to a pacemaker, is implanted under the skin in the chest. When the device detects a sudden increase in heart rate, which accompanies the early stage of a seizure, it attempts to electrically interrupt the seizure before the patient loses consciousness by sending an electrical impulse through a small wire connecting the device to the vagus nerve.

While vagus nerve stimulation has been a common treatment for epileptic seizures since the late 1990s, Albany Med neurologist Anthony Ritaccio, M.D., ’84 says the AspireSR device has a better ability to detect and treat seizures before they occur.

“Previous models of vagus nerve stimulators required patient action to trigger an electrical impulse to the brain once the seizure had already begun,” said Ritaccio, director of Albany Med’s Epilepsy and Human Brain Mapping Program and J. Spencer Standish professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Albany Medical College. “The AspireSR has the ability to detect a seizure before it has begun, even while a patient is asleep. Our hope is that this will significantly decrease the number of seizures our patients experience and improve their quality of life.”

“We are pleased to be able to offer a minimally invasive option to both our adult and pediatric patients who do not respond well to medication and who are not candidates for brain surgery,” said Matthew Adamo, M.D., associate professor of neurosurgery at Albany Med.

AspireSR was FDA approved in June. Albany Med performed its first surgery with the device in early July and has implanted five devices to date. The epilepsy program expects to implant 30-40 devices per year.

The device is only implantable at Level 4 epilepsy centers such as Albany Medical Center. A Level 4 rating from the National Association of Epilepsy Centers indicates a center offers the most advanced medical and surgical treatment options for epilepsy.

Albany Med’s Epilepsy and Human Brain Mapping Program, which is part of the Neurosciences Institute, evaluates more than 350 patients each year in its inpatient epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU). The EMU offers the most technologically sophisticated monitoring experience available, including wireless brainwave recording. Brain mapping techniques are used to locate areas of the brain important for language, memory and movement to safely guide surgical tissue removal in order to stop the seizures.

To learn more about Albany Med’s epilepsy program and how our neurologists and neurosurgeons have helped patients overcome epilepsy, visit http://www.amc.edu/neuro.

Albany Medical Center, northeastern New York’s only academic health sciences center, is one of the largest private employers in the Capital Region. It incorporates the 734-bed Albany Medical Center Hospital, which offers the widest range of medical and surgical services in the region, and the Albany Medical College, which trains the next generation of doctors, scientists and other health care professionals, and also includes a biomedical research enterprise and the region’s largest physicians practice with more than 450 doctors. Albany Medical Center works with dozens of community partners to improve the region’s health and quality of life. For more information: http://www.amc.edu or http://www.facebook.com/albanymedicalcenter.

Source: Health News – New Device to Control Seizures Offered Regionally Only at Albany Med

[WEB SITE] Neurologists evaluate application of smartphones in epilepsy care

While many people with epilepsy can control their seizures with medication, those unpredictable and involuntary changes in behavior and consciousness can be limiting for others. Neurologists writing in the International Journal of Epilepsy evaluated the application of smartphones in epilepsy care.

The paper by Lakshmi Narasimhan Ranganathan and colleagues at the Madras Medical College Institute of Neurology in India has been selected for an Elsevier Atlas Award.

Ranganathan’s team evaluated the mobile applications available for the everyday care of patients with epilepsy. Those apps include seizure diaries as well as medication trackers with reminders to take the next dose of medication. In addition, apps are available to answer any questions patients with epilepsy might have, to detect potential drug interactions and to detect seizures. The latter type of apps senses the irregular motions characteristic of an epileptic seizure and automatically set off an alarm to alert caregivers and doctors.

“Almost all smartphones have a built-in GPS,” Ranganathan said. “They have motion detectors and/or accelerometers. All of those gadgets, if properly integrated into a program, support epilepsy management.”

Ranganathan is already encouraging his patients to take advantage of these technologies. He predicts smartphones will be capable of much more. Already, researchers have shown it is possible to monitor electrical activity in the brain with a headset that sends the electroencephalography (EEG) signal directly to a smartphone. Continuous EEG monitoring could detect the spikes in activity that typically precedes seizures, to alert patients in advance..

The authors say that special sensors integrated into smartphones might allow continuous drug monitoring too. Rather than taking anti-epileptic drugs continuously and suffering from their cognitive side effects, people might take those drugs only when a seizure is coming on.

With almost one percent of people below the age of 20 and three percent of the total population suffering from epilepsy, and 30 percent of those patients refractory to medication, the development and adoption of these apps is of indisputable benefit.

via Neurologists evaluate application of smartphones in epilepsy care.