For many people Epilepsy is an unpredictable disease which brings about many complaints. Very often vocational and educational careers have to be terminated due to the complaints. Medication does not always lead to a life free from complaints, and sometimes the drugs have nasty side-effects (Carpay, 2001). When surgery is not possible, until recently the patient was left to deal with his fate.

Since the sixties of the previous century, research in the United States has been performed into the effects of neurofeedback on epileptic seizures.

In 1967 NASA had the toxicity of their rocket fuel tested on animals from a psychological research lab. The majority of animals developed seizures within the hour. A small group, however, did so only after two hours or more. This group had learned to control a specific brain activity with neurofeedback. Further investigations showed that also among humans an increase of a particular brain activity can lead to protection against epileptic seizures. Using this method 80% of the treated patients experienced at least a 30% decrease of seizure frequency.  About five to ten percent become free of seizures. This data mostly concerns patients who do not respond adequately to medication and who are not eligible for surgery (Sterman, 2000).

EEG Resource Institute uses both this method as well as a more recently developed method (Walker & Kozlowski, 2005), that possibly may lead to an even bigger number of seizure-free patients.

With this method areas in the brain that show a high coherence of activity can be trained to decrease this coherence. Thus an electric front (epileptic seizure) cannot spread as globally as it would normally do.

 Another neurofeedback approach uses slow cortical potentials that are present in the brain. By feeding back these slow cortical potentials (SCP's) good results have been achieved. (Kotchoubey et al., 1999). Also this method is in use at the EEG Resource Institute.

 Literature:

- Carpay JA. (2001) Wat zijn de mogelijkheden voor diagnostiek en behandeling? In: Volksgezondheid Toekomst Verkenning, Nationaal Kompas Volksgezondheid. Bilthoven: RIVM.
- Kotchoubey, B., Strehl, U., HolzapfelS, et al. (1999). Negative potential shifts and the predictrion of the outcome of neurofeedback therapy in epilepsy. Clinical Neurophysiology, 110, 683-686.
- Sterman, M.B. (2000). Basic Concepts and Clinical Findings in the Treatment of Seizure Disorders with EEG operant conditioning. Clinical Encephalography, 31, 45-55.
- Walker JE & Kozlowski GP (2005). Neuorfeedback Treatment of epilepsy. Child and adolescent psychiatric clinics of North America, 14, 163-176,