The Texas Comprehensive Epilepsy Program

The Texas Comprehensive Epilepsy Program is the leading medical program in the southwestern United States for diagnosing and treating patients of all ages with seizures and epilepsy.

Our staff is committed to helping each patient achieve the best possible seizure control and the desired quality of life using comprehensive diagnostic and treatment methods. We use modern methods to precisely identify the abnormal brain region generating the seizures and regions with important cognitive, motor and/or sensory function.

Based at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center, the program provides an essential resource for medical evaluation, care and surgical treatment for adults and children. Composed of specialists and allied health professionals who are experts in epileptology, our epilepsy team uses sophisticated imaging and monitoring technology to evaluate patients and identify the etiology and origin of their seizures. Treatment may involve adjusting or changing medications, vagus nerve stimulation, use of the specialized ketogenic diet or performing a surgical procedure.

The core members of our epilepsy team include adult and pediatric neurologists, an epidemiologist, neuropsychologists, neuroradiologists and neurosurgeons. They are supported by an epilepsy nurse clinician, fellows in clinical neurophysiology, research coordinators and EEG technologists. All treatment decisions are reviewed during weekly clinical care conferences. Patient cases are discussed in detail, and decisions are made about the next course of action.
  

Epilepsy Monitoring Unit

Our specialized nine-bed Epilepsy Monitoring Unit is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind in the Houston area. Dedicated to compassionate care of infants, children and adults with seizure disorders, the unit offers the latest in diagnosis and treatment of epileptic conditions, from the ketogenic diet to anticonvulsant medications and surgical intervention.

Memorial Hermann's Level IV Epilepsy Program – the highest ranking available – serves more patients than any other program in the southern United States. Testing to determine the most effective treatment options may be done on an inpatient or outpatient basis.

The Ketogenic Diet

A special diet used to treat multiple types of seizures, the ketogenic diet was initially developed in the 1920s as a treatment option to replace total fasting for those with intractable epilepsy. While fasting may be effective, it can only control seizure activity as long as the fast is continued. Because of problems with extended fasting, early researchers investigated the ketogenic diet as a way of mimicking starvation ketosis while allowing the consumption of food.

They discovered that a diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates and protein would result in ketosis, an abnormal increase in ketone bodies in the blood, as in diabetes mellitus. Fluids are limited, which helps contribute to the diet's success.

It works best in children under 10 and is most effective for myoclonic or minor motor seizures. Myoclonic seizures consist of single or multiple brief, irregular muscular contractions of the trunk and/or extremities. A brief loss of consciousness sometimes occurs.

Advances in medications have since replaced the ketogenic diet as an initial form of treatment for epilepsy, but in recent years, interest in the diet has been renewed. It has a success rate of 50 percent, stopping seizures in 10 to 15 percent of cases and further reducing them in 30 to 40 percent of cases. Children who are seizure free stay on the diet two years, then return to a normal diet and typically never have another seizure again.