Treatment is advisable if seizures are recurrent and troublesome. The following are the major options available:
1. Drugs - Control of the seizures with drugs can be good in most cases without causing harmful side-effects. Whenever possible one drug should be used in as few doses each day as necessary to ensure adequate blood levels by day and by night. Sometimes more than one drug has to be used.
Generally, the more modern treatments produce fewer problems than the older drugs. If drugs are given only sporadically, or different from the way prescribed, seizure control will be poor. Drugs should never be stopped suddenly. If you are concerned about any aspect of treatment, be sure to talk to your doctor.
2. Psychological intervention - Some children's seizures are made worse by such things as stress, emotional upset and boredom. In these cases it is important to identify the problem and deal with it, which may require help from a counsellor in addition to the medication being continued.
3. Surgery -Only a small number of children with epilepsy will be suitable for surgery but improved investigations and new surgical techniques mean that surgery can now be very successful for some children. Unfortunately not all epilepsies have a good prognosis and some children will have seizures for many years, even for all their lives. In general the prognosis for good seizure control is poor where epilepsy is associated with intellectual disability, especially if severe. Rarely seizures cannot be controlled because of progressive underlying brain disease.