Pacemakers Could Save Lives of Epilepsy Sufferers

Implanting a pacemaker could save the lives of some patients with epilepsy who suffer dangerously irregular heart rhythms during seizures, researchers said on Friday.

Every year, about one in 1,000 people with chronic epilepsy die suddenly, unexpectedly and with no explanation. Now doctors have discovered that abnormal heartbeats are an under-reported consequence of epileptic seizures, suggesting that using cardiac pacemakers to regulate heart rhythm might avoid many deaths. Professor John Duncan of the Institute of Neurology, University College London, and colleagues monitored the heart rhythms of 20 patients during 377 seizures and found very fast and very slow beats were common. Four patients had dangerously low heartbeats and were given a permanent pacemaker as a result of the investigation. Three of them had potentially fatal cardiac inactivity, or asystole. “Asystole underlies a proportion of sudden unexpected deaths in epilepsy, which could be prevented by cardiac-pacemaker insertion,” the research team wrote in The Lancet medical journal.(Source: The Lancet: Reuters Health: December 2004.)