Epilepsy is one of the most common chronic nervous system diseases, and temporal lobe epilepsy is the most frequent type of focal epilepsy, accounting for 60%. Approximately two thirds of temporal lobe epilepsy are drug-refractory. In 1950, Penfield first designed anterior temporal lobectomy for the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy. Since then, anterior temporal lobectomy has become the standard surgery. Temporal lobe epilepsy accounts for roughly one third of all types of epilepsy undergoing surgical treatment.
However, conventional frontotemporal craniotomy is adopted in anterior temporal lobectomy, leading to significant surgical trauma and multiple postoperative complications. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the anterior temporal lobectomy and make it less minimally invasive. Over the past 70 years, no surgical treatment with both minimal invasiveness and clinical efficacy has been established. In 2020, the team led by Professor Zhang Hua from Department of Neurosurgery of the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi 'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) innovatively designed a functional anterior temporal lobectomy based on surgical experience, which achieved minimally invasive treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy without sacrificing clinical efficacy.
Compared with conventional anterior temporal lobectomy, functional anterior temporal lobectomy reduced the incision size by 2/3, decreased the bone flap size by 3/4, significantly lowered the risk of complications and caused almost invisible incision after surgery. The short-term seizure-free rate was 92% and the effective rate was 96%. During postoperative follow-up, patients were more willing to choose functional anterior temporal lobectomy with high degree of satisfaction.
On November 4, 2022, the team published an Original Article entitled "Functional Anterior Temporal Lobectomy for Temporal Lobe Epilepsy: A Novell, Alternative, and Less Invasive Therapy" in Operative Neurosurgery, which illustrated the research results of functional anterior temporal lobectomy for temporal lobe epilepsy. This study is the original research of the First Affiliated Hospital of XJTU, which is the first surgical procedure of this kind worldwide and highly recognized by the peer reviewers. Liu Yong, Ren Yutao and Meng Qiang, members of Professor Zhang Hua's team, are the co-first authors, and Professor Zhang Hua is the corresponding author of this article.
Functional anterior temporal lobectomy is everthe first procedure to truly achieve both minimal invasiveness and high clinical efficacy in the treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy, signifying groundbreaking achievements in the minimally invasive surgery of temporal lobe epilepsy and the beginning of minimally invasive era of epilepsy surgery around the globe. It also marks that the epilepsy treatment in our hospital has reached international leading level.
Article link: https://journals.lww.com/onsonline/Abstract/9900/Functional_Anterior_Temporal_Lobectomy_for.469.aspx.
