UT Southwestern Medical Center has one of the nation’s leading epilepsy treatment programs and offers comprehensive care for adults, adolescents and children. Our epilepsy program includes not only neurologists and neurosurgeons, but also neuroradiologists, neurophysiologists, research nurses, diagnostic technologists and social workers. These specialists provide a thorough evaluation to determine the most effective epilepsy treatments.

The National Association of Epilepsy Centers, which evaluates medical facilities on a regional, national and international basis, has designated UT Southwestern as a Level 4 epilepsy center, which is the highest level. Our physicians and researchers are leaders in epilepsy drug research, electroencephalography (EEG) evaluation, brain mapping methods and operative EEG techniques.

UT Southwestern’s epilepsy physicians participate in weekly conferences on clinical neurophysiology topics that review the latest research and findings on the treatment of epilepsy.

For patients with epilepsy that cannot be controlled with medication, UT Southwestern offers physicians highly skilled in brain imaging, monitoring and other advanced medical techniques to localize, and in some cases surgically remove, the focus of our patients’ seizures. UT Southwestern’s Epilepsy Monitoring Unit, the busiest of its kind in North Texas, allows us to continuously monitor patients with uncontrolled seizures. A 2002 review of 147 adults with temporal lobe epilepsy who underwent surgery at UT Southwestern over the previous 10 years revealed that 90 individuals had no seizures after surgery and an additional 19 patients who had one or more seizures following surgery are now seizure-free.

Pediatric Epilepsy

Our physicians and researchers also include physicians in treating neonatal and pediatric epilepsy. UT Southwestern’s pediatric doctors work closely with the adult epilepsy program and provide inpatient monitoring and treatments for epilepsy and related sleep disorders. We administer more than 2,000 pediatric EEGs annually and hold weekly conferences to discuss and evaluate treatments for each pediatric patient.

UT Southwestern’s pediatric Epilepsy Monitoring Unit is one of the few in the nation dedicated to studying childhood epilepsy and developing new treatments.