Effects of long barbiturate anaesthesia on eight children with severe epilepsy

Abstract

Frequent epileptic seizures in children are often related to delayed psychomotor development, and status epilepticus is always a neurological emergency. In both situations barbiturate anaesthesia has been used for status epilepticus since the 1960s, and for intractable seizures in children since the 1980s. However, the clinical results on the effectiveness of barbiturate anaesthesia in children with chronic epileptic disorders remain contradictory. Between 1986 and 1991 in Tampere University Hospital in Finland long barbiturate anaesthesia was introduced--using thiopentone sodium--to eight children with very severe epilepsy. Children were 10 months to 7 years 11 months of age and the mean time from the onset of seizures to the introduction of BA was 2 years 8 months. Effects upon seizure frequency, antiepileptic medication and/or psychomotor development were clearly positive in three patients, slightly positive in one patient and in four patients there was no effect. Good effect seemed to be associated with an anaesthesia which is deep and long enough to produce loss of consciousness and spontaneous reactions, and an electroencephalographic pattern of burst-suppression. Positive results were also more often achieved when the treatment lag was less than 12 months. Physical and neurophysiological properties of barbiturates make their effectiveness as anticonvulsants understandable, but there is only little evidence to explain the mechanism of this action.