Future aspects of the presurgical evaluation in epilepsy.

Epilepsy surgery is a successful therapeutic approach in patients with medically intractable epilepsy. The presurgical evaluation aims to detect the epileptogenic brain area by use of different diagnostic techniques. In this review article the current diagnostic procedures applied for this purpose are described. The diagnostic armamentarium can be divided conceptually into three different groups: assessment of function/dysfunction, structural/morphologic imaging methods and functional neuroimaging techniques. Properties, diagnostic power and limits of all diagnostic tools used in the diagnostic evaluation are discussed. In addition, future perspectives and the diagnostic value of new technologies are mentioned. Some are increasingly gaining acceptance in the routine preoperative diagnostic procedure like MR volumetry or MR spectroscopy of the hippocampus in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. Some, on the other hand, like MEG and 11C-flumazenil PET, still remain experimental diagnostic tools as they are technically demanding and cost intensive. Besides the refinement of established techniques, co-registration of different modalities like spike-triggered functional MRI will play an important role in the non-invasive detection of the epileptic seizure focus and may change the regimen of the preoperative diagnostic work up of epilepsy patients in the future.

Depression in children with cancer.

The results of a standardized evaluation of the occurrence of depression in a group of 34 children suffering from cancer are presented. The children (13 male, 21 female) were admitted to the oncological unit of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Graz, Austria, during a 14 months-course (January 1987-March 1988). We rated each child 4 times in 4 weekly intervals after admission and start of induction chemotherapy. To access the occurrence and severity of depression and to monitor progress during treatment we performed a psychiatric interview and also applied the psychiatric rating scale CDRS (Children's Depression Rating Scale) by Poznanski et al 1979 and SCMDD (Self-Report Symptom Checklist for Major Depressive Disorders) by Kashani et al 1985 derived from DSM III. 340 diagnostic ratings were performed by 3 raters; two of them were psychotherapeutically trained pediatricians (M. D., P. J. S.) and one psychologist (L. W.). A "clearcut" depression was found in 25 of the 340 ratings i.e. in 6 of the 34 children, demonstrating that the occurrence of depression in pediatric cancer patients was lower than primarily assumed.