A brain implant reduced this boy's epilepsy seizures by 80%. And he charges it with headphones

Before he got his new brain implant, 13-year-old Oran Knowlson's whole life revolved around his seizures.

The British boy has a rare, medicine-resistant form of epilepsy that caused him to have hundreds of seizures a day,  putting him at constant risk of injury, and making it impossible to participate in the same activities as other kids his age.

But since his surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital For Children in London eight months ago, Oran has seen his seizures reduced by 80 per cent, according to his surgeon. As a result, he's taken up some new hobbies — including horseback riding.

"It's absolutely lovely," Dr. Martin Tisdall, the pediatric neurosurgeon who led the surgery, told As It Happens host Nil Koksal. 

"The family are really putting their trust and their faith in you, and so it's incredibly pleasing to see the positive benefits it's had on his quality of life." 

The device, which sends electrical pulses to the brain to block seizures, is the first of its kind to be embedded directly into the brain, and Oran is the first patient in the world to have one implanted, as part of a clinical trial in the U.K.

This type of electrical stimulation has been used to treat epilepsy patients before, and usually involves placing a device inside the chest that needs to be replaced every few years. But Oran's implant is nestled under his skull, and he can charge it from the comfort of home, just by wearing a special pair of headphones. 

If it continues to work well with Oran and in subsequent trials, doctors say it could be used more widely to help children with medicine-resident epilepsy, without forcing them to undergo repeated surgeries all their lives.

Most people who have epilepsy can manage it with medicine alone. In the rare cases where medicine doesn't work, patients can undergo surgery to remove the part of the brain that triggers seizures.

But Oran has Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, a rare form of epilepsy that's not only resistant to medicine, but is also too generalized throughout the brain to be targeted in surgery.

"These children do not have good treatment options at the moment," Tisdall said. "So without us carrying out further research and developing further treatments, they're really looking at a lifetime of seizures ahead of them."

In Oran's case, those seizures began when he was three years old and became progressively worse. Eventually, Oran was experiencing hundreds of seizures a day, Tisdall said.

"Before the seizures began, Oran was hitting all his milestones. But as seizures became more severe, we lost more and more of Oran," his mother, Justine Knowlson, said in a hospital press release.

"From being a happy, energetic three-year-old, he struggled to engage in the world."