Resective surgery combined with corpus callosotomy for children with non-focal lesional Lennox–Gastaut syndrome

Background The first prospective trial for resective surgery combined with corpus callosotomy (CCT) was performed to investigate the outcomes of the combined surgery in children with Lennox–Gastaut syndrome (LGS) without focal lesion on brain MRI. Methods This study enrolled 68 children with LGS and without focal lesion on brain MRI, of which 25 received medicine (medicine group) and 43 underwent surgery (surgery group), including 20 with exclusively resective surgery (exclusively resection subgroup) and 23 with resective surgery combined with CCT (combined CCT subgroup). All patients were followed for 3–5 years. Results Significant differences in seizure control were observed between the medicine group and the exclusively resection subgroup and combined CCT subgroup at the 1-year, 3-year, and 5-year follow-ups. There was a trend that the children with resection combined with CCT had better seizure control than those with exclusively resection at the three follow-ups, but this could not be verified by the statistical method used. Furthermore, significant differences were not observed in seizure control between children with different MRI findings, age at surgery, or pathology in the surgery group. The percentage of long-term seizure-free did not remain as high as the percentage of early stage seizure-free at 1-year follow-up. However, the children with combined CCT surgery demonstrated more postoperative improvement than the children with resective surgery alone based on the mean QOL score (10.78 vs. 5.75, p = 0.0152) and full-scale IQ (7.91 vs. 4.55, p = 0.0446). Conclusions Resective surgery combined with CCT can provide favorable seizure control and obvious improvements in QOL and IQ in children with LGS. This combined approach can be performed in carefully selected LGS children without focal lesions and can localize the epileptogenic zone following a comprehensive preoperative evaluation.