4 Breakthrough Treatments for Treatment-Resistant Epilepsy
Sep 17, 2026
When people think of epilepsy, they likely picture a person going through a seizure and picturing common myths about the illness, such as people swallowing their tongue or needing to be held down. Both are misconceptions, and you’d be surprised to know that many people deal with the illness (1% of U.S. adults and 456,000 children) and live normal lives.
However, not all epilepsy cases are the same, and it can be difficult to get treatment if the condition resists traditional methods. If this does happen, there are still options, so let’s explore more about this illness, what it means to be drug-resistant, and how we treat these cases.
Our dedicated medical staff at Riverhills Neuroscience helps the residents of Norwood, Anderson, and Westside, Ohio, and Crestview Hills, Kentucky, with many neurological illnesses, including managing the symptoms of epilepsy.
Electricity supports proper brain function; rapid electrical pulses in neurons transmit thoughts and influence behavior and perception, among other things. Epilepsy occurs when electrical brain activity becomes abnormal and causes seizures. While tumors or having a stroke can cause you to deal with epilepsy, it can develop without a known cause.
The type of seizure you have depends on where the abnormal electrical activity occurs in the brain and can include generalized, focal, temporal lobe, febrile, tonic-clonic, and absence seizures. When dealing with seizures, people can experience jerking, twitching, staring spells, brief losses of awareness, automatic movements, and unusual sensations.
When you continue to experience seizures after at least two appropriate medications for your epilepsy, it’s considered to be drug-resistant. It happens in around one out of three adults with epilepsy, and one in four children with the illness. Of course, if you continue to have seizures, it can happen for other reasons.
Other reasons for continuing to have seizures after getting medications include an improper diagnosis (other conditions can resemble this symptom), a need for a dose adjustment, dealing with multiple seizure triggers, and an inconsistent medication schedule.
When the usual medications fail to stop seizures from happening, other options to help include:
While open brain surgery has been available for decades to treat epilepsy (since the 1940s), minimally invasive treatments like laser ablation work by inserting a small fiber into the brain and burning away the problem without having to open it up.
A small device gets implanted into your vagus nerve (located in your neck), which blocks the faulty signals that cause seizures.
This minute battery-powered system is placed in the skull just under the scalp, and leads are placed in the parts of the brain where seizures develop.
A device that uses electrical impulses to manage seizures, placed in your left chest muscle, by blocking signals from nerve cells.
Research is constant in the struggle to help people with treatment-resistant epilepsy, and options like this are just some examples of how medical technology is helping. To find the right treatment for your epilepsy issues, make an appointment with our team at Riverhills Neuroscience today.