Epilepsy Forum - Epilepsy & Gastric Bypass Surgery

Shaynlukesmom, I'm sure there is a connection between your seizures and the gastric bypass surgery.

My husband is epileptic and his seizures were controlled for many years until he had gastric bypass surgery. After doing some research, I discovered that high fat diets are successfully used to treat epileptics. Take away the ability to absorb fat--which gastric bypass surgery does--and you have the opposite of a high-fat diet. It seems fat is necessary for the control of seizures.

My husband began having both petit mal and grand mal seizures several months after having his gastric bypass surgery. The seizures began after he had lost most of his weight.

At first, we thought the surgery was causing a problem with absorption of the medication. But blood work showed therapeutic levels of Trileptal, the medication he had been taking successfully for years. Regardless of the therapeutic levels, he still continued to have seizures. The doctors increased the dosage of Trileptal, but this did not help, and his seizures continued. This is when I began doing research and found the link between fat and seizure control. (If you look up the Ketogenic Diet you can more information on how high fat diets control seizures. )

My husband ended up going to the University of California at Irvine Medical Center for evaluation for brain surgery to control the seizures. This is when I met Jack Lin, MD, an epileptologist at the hospital. I talked to him about my theory regarding fat absorption and seizures, and he said it made sense to him. He told me if I could find six people who had experienced the same situation as my husband, he would do a research paper on the topic, to be published in an epilepsy journal. I was determined to make this happen since I felt it was very important that epileptics be warned about the potential seizures after gastric bypass surgery. Right now, gastric bypass surgeons seem unaware of this situation and are telling epileptics that the surgery is perfectly safe for them.

I subsequently posted information on the Internet and started this Yahoo group. In the past 8 months, I have been contacted by five individuals who began experiencing seizures after gastric bypass surgery. What shocked me is that only one of these people ever had seizures before the surgery! I spoke to Dr. Lin about this, and his feeling was that these people all had a tendency toward seizures, and when fat absorption was disrupted in their body, their seizure threshold was lowered and they began having seizures. One woman had such terrible seizures after the surgery (a grand mal every day!), she planned to have the gastric bypass surgery reversed.

Dr. Lin has not started working on the research paper yet because two of the five people who contacted me refused to be part of the research, even though it only requires them to give permission to their doctors to give medical records to Dr. Lin. So you won't find anything published on this topic. I can tell you that Dr. Lin contacted the surgeon at my husband's gastric bypass center and warned him to be careful about doing gastric bypass surgery on epileptics.

Please email me if you have any more questions, would like to help with the research paper, or just need to talk: audre y@audreypavia.com.