Epilepsy

UT Southwestern has one of the nation’s leading epilepsy programs and offers comprehensive care for adults, adolescents and children. Our epilepsy specialists, including neuroradiologists, neurophysiologists, research nurses, dia gnostic technologists and social workers, provide thorough evaluation and effective treatments for our epilepsy patients.

The National Association of Epilepsy Centers, which evaluates medical facilities on a regional, national and international basis, has designated UT Southwestern as a fourth-level epilepsy center, which is the highest level designated by the foundation. Our physicians and researchers are leaders in epilepsy drug research, including electroencephalography (EEG) evaluation, brain mapping methods and operative EEG techniques designed to uncover the causes of epilepsy and develop new treatments.

UT Southwestern’s epilepsy specialists participate in weekly lectures on clinical neurophysiology topics that delve into the latest research and findings on the treatment of epilepsy. The medical staff and facilities at UT Southwestern provide our patients with state-of-the-art neurophysiology services in a setting that allows us to focus on you as unique individual, with specific needs in your treatment for 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 specialists in treating neonatal and pediatric epilepsy. UT Southwestern’s pediatric doctors work closely with our 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 we hold weekly conferences to discuss and evaluate treatments for each of our pediatric patients. UT Southwestern’s pediatric Epilepsy Monitoring Unit is one of the few in the nation dedicated to studying childhood epilepsy and developing new treatments.