Management of Epilepsy in Resource-Limited Areas: Establishing an Epilepsy Surgery Program in Iran

Of about 40 million people with epilepsy, who live in developing countries, the majority do not receive appropriate treatment. Nonetheless, there are striking disparities among the so called developing countries, however generally speaking, access to and availability of epilepsy management programs in developing countries are very limited and therefore, the issue of developing epilepsy centers in resource-limited settings in a large scale is very essential. The surgery for epilepsy, including temporal lobotomy, lesionectomy and corpus colostomy, for patients with medically-refractory seizures, defined as failure of adequate trials of two tolerated, appropriately chosen and using antiepileptic drug to achieve sustained freedom, from seizure has been proved to be feasible and cost-effective in developing countries. However, the success of epilepsy surgery depends upon the accurate identification of good surgical candidates based on the available resources and technologies without jeopardizing safety. In the current paper, we will share our experiences of establishing an epilepsy surgery program in Iran, despite all short-comings and limitations and try to provide some answers to those challenges, which helped us establish our program.