Mounzer Kassab is an associate professor in the MSU Department of Neurology and a
Sparrow neurologist. His training, however, was in Dallas, where he worked with a large center for epilepsy monitoring. After moving to Lansing, he was surprised to find those services unavailable in the mid-Michigan region.
"When we have people with epilepsy, almost a third of them do not respond to therapy," says Kassab. "With these hospital units they could admit them, monitor their condition and help them."
Kassab has been working for five years to bring an epilepsy monitoring unit to Lansing. Now, Sparrow Hospital and Michigan State University HealthTeam have opened a three-bed, 600 square foot unit that has already successfully monitored 16 patients.
"It took a lot of allocating personnel, money and space to get this done," says Kassab.
He and his colleagues agree the effort and $150,000 investment will be worth the result. Epileptic patients who don't respond to medication may now check-in to the local unit for 24-hour monitoring. Staff will match up physical symptoms to brainwave data, and doctors can locate the area of the brain causing them issues.
"Then we do specific tests to make sure it is safe to remove that area, and then we meet with the surgeon," says Kassab. According to Kassab, the success rate for these surgeries can be 70 to 80 percent, depending on the location of the problematic area.
"For these patients," he says, "to have a success rate close to 70 percent is amazing."
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