Bob's story is a really nicely illustrates some of the issues that older people in particular face when they're diagnosed with epilepsy as far as quality of life and independence.
A seizure that occurs when somebody is operating a car, even if it just results a few seconds of loss of attention, concentration, or ability to control the movements of their limbs, can have very tragic outcomes. Bob was really quite lucky that his seizure resulted in no injury to himself. That story could have much worse outcome to him. That's the reason that most states and countries do regulate by law people's ability to drive if they had a seizure.
Now on the negative side of that aspect, it's very difficult for patients to maintain their independence when they're not able to drive particularly when public transportation is not available to them.
We have a lot of treatments available for epilepsy. The mainstay still is anticonvulsant medication and there are number of medicines available in the market and in general we're able to find a medication for patients that is effective, in other words meaning that they are seizure-free and also is well tolerated, meaning they are not dealing with a lot of side effects from the medication.
For those who don't respond to medication, there are stimulator devices that can be used to try to bring up epilepsy under control or in some cases patients maybe candidates for brain surgery to treat their seizure.
For a small group of patients we have a cure for epilepsy, meaning that we get rid of the disorder altogether. Usually, that would mean a surgical treatment and again it's only a small group of people where we kind of come to the point where is surgery is a consideration. For most people management of epilepsy is really about managing the symptoms, meaning managing the seizures and that's what anti-seizure medication is all about.
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