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Epilepsy

Published on December 2, 2014 Updated on September 22, 2020   46 min

A selection of talks on Neuroscience

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0:00
My name is Dr. Gregory Cascino. I'm the Professor of Neuroscience at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine. I'm Chair of the Division of Epilepsy at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. My remarks will be restricted to the evaluation and treatment of patients with drug resistant focal epilepsy who may be candidates for epilepsy surgery.
0:22
Epilepsy is one of the most common chronic neurologic disorders. The present definition includes patients with recurrent and unprovoked seizures. These often include patients with two or more seizure episodes. However, recent reevaluation of the classification of patients with seizures indicates even those with a single seizure who have significant risk factor for recurrence are considered to have epilepsy or a seizure disorder. In the community, the prevalence of epilepsy may be as high as 3% to 4% and the fastest growing group are those of 80 years of age or older. The incidents in the United States is 180,000 patients per year. The peaks for the development of epilepsy are very early in life and later in life. The cost of epilepsy in the United States is 12.5 billion US dollars, and most of this is indirect costs, such as unemployment, underemployment, need for a caregiver, unable to live independently.
1:26
We know that epilepsy has been well described, and it's probably one of the most frequently identified diseases in historic medicine. "The Falling Sickness" is a beautiful treaties on the history of epilepsy from the Greeks to the beginning of modern neurology.