Surgery for epilepsy

This is an updated version of the original Cochrane review, published in 2015.Focal epilepsies are caused by a malfunction of nerve cells localised in one part of one cerebral hemisphere. In studies, estimates of the number of individuals with focal epilepsy who do not become seizure-free despite optimal drug therapy vary between at least 20% and up to 70%. If the epileptogenic zone can be located, surgical resection offers the chance of a cure with a corresponding increase in quality of life.

The primary objective is to assess the overall outcome of epilepsy surgery according to evidence from randomised controlled trials.Secondary objectives are to assess the overall outcome of epilepsy surgery according to non-randomised evidence, and to identify the factors that correlate with remission of seizures postoperatively.

For the latest update, we searched the following databases on 11 March 2019: Cochrane Register of Studies (CRS Web), which includes the Cochrane Epilepsy Group Specialized Register and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), MEDLINE (Ovid, 1946 to March 08, 2019), ClinicalTrials.gov, and the World Health Organization (WHO) International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).

Eligible studies were randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that included at least 30 participants in a well-defined population (age, sex, seizure type/frequency, duration of epilepsy, aetiology, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) diagnosis, surgical findings), with an MRI performed in at least 90% of cases and an expected duration of follow-up of at least one year, and reporting an outcome related to postoperative seizure control. Cohort studies or case series were included in the previous version of this review.

Three groups of two review authors independently screened all references for eligibility, assessed study quality and risk of bias, and extracted data. Outcomes were proportions of participants achieving a good outcome according to the presence or absence of each prognostic factor of interest. We intended to combine data with risk ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs).

We identified 182 studies with a total of 16,855 included participants investigating outcomes of surgery for epilepsy. Nine studies were RCTs (including two that randomised participants to surgery or medical treatment (99 participants included in the two trials received medical treatment)). Risk of bias in these RCTs was unclear or high. Most of the remaining 173 non-randomised studies followed a retrospective design. We assessed study quality using the Effective Public Health Practice Project (EPHPP) tool and determined that most studies provided moderate or weak evidence. For 29 studies reporting multivariate analyses, we used the Quality in Prognostic Studies (QUIPS) tool and determined that very few studies were at low risk of bias across domains.In terms of freedom from seizures, two RCTs found surgery (n = 97) to be superior to medical treatment (n = 99); four found no statistically significant differences between anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) with or without corpus callosotomy (n = 60), between subtemporal or transsylvian approach to selective amygdalohippocampectomy (SAH) (n = 47); between ATL, SAH and parahippocampectomy (n = 43) or between 2.5 cm and 3.5 cm ATL resection (n = 207). One RCT found total hippocampectomy to be superior to partial hippocampectomy (n = 70) and one found ATL to be superior to stereotactic radiosurgery (n = 58); and another provided data to show that for Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, no significant differences in seizure outcomes were evident between those treated with resection of the epileptogenic zone and those treated with resection of the epileptogenic zone plus corpus callosotomy (n = 43). We judged evidence from the nine RCTs to be of moderate to very low quality due to lack of information reported about the randomised trial design and the restricted study populations.Of the 16,756 participants included in this review who underwent a surgical procedure, 10,696 (64%) achieved a good outcome from surgery; this ranged across studies from 13.5% to 92.5%. Overall, we found the quality of data in relation to recording of adverse events to be very poor.In total, 120 studies examined between one and eight prognostic factors in univariate analysis. We found the following prognostic factors to be associated with a better post-surgical seizure outcome: abnormal pre-operative MRI, no use of intracranial monitoring, complete surgical resection, presence of mesial temporal sclerosis, concordance of pre-operative MRI and electroencephalography, history of febrile seizures, absence of focal cortical dysplasia/malformation of cortical development, presence of tumour, right-sided resection, and presence of unilateral interictal spikes. We found no evidence that history of head injury, presence of encephalomalacia, presence of vascular malformation, and presence of postoperative discharges were prognostic factors of outcome.Twenty-nine studies reported multi-variable models of prognostic factors, and showed that the direction of association of factors with outcomes was generally the same as that found in univariate analyses.We observed variability in many of our analyses, likely due to small study sizes with unbalanced group sizes and variation in the definition of seizure outcome, the definition of prognostic factors, and the influence of the site of surgery AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: Study design issues and limited information presented in the included studies mean that our results provide limited evidence to aid patient selection for surgery and prediction of likely surgical outcomes. Future research should be of high quality, follow a prospective design, be appropriately powered, and focus on specific issues related to diagnostic tools, the site-specific surgical approach, and other issues such as extent of resection. Researchers should investigate prognostic factors related to the outcome of surgery via multi-variable statistical regression modelling, where variables are selected for modelling according to clinical relevance, and all numerical results of the prognostic models are fully reported. Journal editors should not accept papers for which study authors did not record adverse events from a medical intervention. Researchers have achieved improvements in cancer care over the past three to four decades by answering well-defined questions through the conduct of focused RCTs in a step-wise fashion. The same approach to surgery for epilepsy is required.