Presenting Epilepsy Study at National Level
Adriana Tanner, MD, medical director of Epilepsy Services, and Carol Walters, have been invited to present at the 63rd Annual Meeting of the American Epilepsy Society.
(September 10, 2009) - Tanner and Walters will be presenting on their study titled, The effects of art intervention in depression and anxiety in patients undergoing long-term Video-EEG monitoring in Boston this December. Through the generous funding of Saint Mary’s Doran Foundation, the pair created a pilot program that ended in March 2009 that measured the effects of art intervention on patients’ anxiety and depression in the Epilepsy Monitoring Unit (EMU), now located on Hauenstein 3.
While patients undergo monitoring, they stay for several days and are taken off their seizure-preventing medication. They and their brains are closely watched to see from where their seizures originate to determine what course of treatment can be taken to either alleviate or eliminate seizures altogether.
Fifty people who stayed in the unit painted tiles and magnets, made origami, or worked on other art projects. A control group and an art intervention group were randomly chosen. For the art intervention group, both depression and anxiety were significantly reduced, and were “the best results you could get.”
Tanner and Walters hope that these preliminary findings will provide advanced research opportunities for other neurological disorders and as well as those with epilepsy, and presenting their findings to the American Epilepsy Society of America is one step closer to this goal.
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