Safety and effectiveness of surgery for epilepsy in children. Experience of a tertiary hospital in Ecuador.

Introduction: There is sufficient evidence on the usefulness of surgery as a therapeutic alternative for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy; however this treatment is underutilized, especially in developing countries.

Methods: We describe the outcomes of epilepsy surgery in 27 paediatric patients at Hospital Baca Ortiz in Quito, Ecuador. Our analysis considered the following variables: reduction in seizure frequency, surgery outcome according to the Engel classification, improvement in quality of life, and serious complications due to surgery.

[Standards for carrying out and interpreting visual evoked potentials in children].

Introduction: An essential step, prior to the introduction into paediatric practice of visual evoked potentials (VEP) caused by stimulation with light emitting diodes (LED) is their description at different stages of maturity of the nervous system.

Patients And Methods: We obtained VEP to LED in a group of 60 children aged between 1 and 5 years, who were functionally healthy and equally distributed with regard to age and sex. In each case we recorded the responses to monocular stimulation (right and left), binocular stimulation and without stimulation (replicas of each condition).