Epilepsy Center at Nationwide Children's Hospital

Comprehensive pediatric epilepsy care requires unique specialists, leading technology and a multidisciplinary team. At the Epilepsy Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, we take it to the highest level. That’s why the National Association of Epilepsy Centers has accredited us as a level-four epilepsy program—the highest level of epilepsy care.

In addition to standard services, we provide complex neurodiagnostic monitoring as well as neuropsychological and psychosocial evaluation and treatment. Our level-four designation also means offering advanced epilepsy surgery services, including evaluation with intracranial electrodes.

Interdisciplinary Team Members: A major distinction of a level-4 epilepsy center is the comprehensive nature of its services and professional team. At Nationwide Children’s, we evaluate and care for children from the onset of seizures, through therapeutic interventions, and advanced epilepsy surgery when appropriate.

New Onset Seizure Clinic: Another key feature of our comprehensive program is our New Onset Seizure Clinic. This specialized clinic not only addresses a patient’s immediate medical needs. It also focuses on the educational and psychosocial needs of the child and his or her family when they have encountered a first seizure or a new diagnosis of epilepsy.

Epilepsy Surgery: Our neurosurgical program plays an integral role in the epilepsy center. Curative surgery for seizures includes operating on the portion of the brain responsible for seizure onset. Other special surgical procedures, such as hemispherectomy, corpus callosotomy or implantation of vagus nerve stimulators, are used to improve seizure control. As a level-four center, we are able to assess children with medically refractory seizures where the cause of the seizure is identified by MRI abnormality, as well as cases where the MRI is normal. We also conduct functional cortical mapping by stimulation of subdural electrodes either extra-operatively or intraoperatively.

Complex Epilepsy Clinic: Patients who are not candidates for epilepsy surgery and have not become seizure-free after being on at least two different seizure medications can be referred to our Complex Epilepsy Clinic. Here our comprehensive team meets with patients and their families to discuss the patient’s needs with the goal of identifying other possible treatment options including, but not limited to, possible inclusion in epilepsy medication trials for treatments not yet available commercially.

Use of Advanced Technology: The Epilepsy Center uses the latest technological advancements to diagnose and treat epilepsy. Our video telemetry unit incorporates continuous EEG monitoring with simultaneous digital video recordings to time-lock clinical events to the EEG. For children with intractable seizures, EEG recordings directly from the surface of the brain are available to map discrete lesions for possible surgical resection.

http://www.nationwidechildrens.org/epilepsy-center