Implant Gives Epileptics New Hope Holding A Magnet To The Tiny Computer In His Chest, One Patient Has Been Able To Abort Seizures Just As They Are Beginning.

Chris Rich had known from the start that the experiment would involve surgery and general anesthesia, that it would take more than six months to complete, and that there was no guarantee any of it would help him.

But still he had gone ahead with the experiment. Rich has epilepsy and was willing to do almost anything to make the seizures stop.

Drugs had been only partly effective in controlling his disease. They stopped the devastating convulsions that used to knock him senseless and leave him writhing on the floor, but they did not prevent the smaller seizures that still came several times a month, plunging him into an oblivion that lasted two or three minutes.

"It's not a nice feeling," Rich said by way of explaining why he was sitting in Temple University Hospital at that moment, waiting for a neurologist to turn on the tiny computer that had been implanted in his chest.

The 27-year-old ambulance aide and volunteer firefighter was one of 120 patients participating in a nationwide study. Researchers wanted to see whether epileptic seizures could be stopped with periodic jolts of electricity to the brain from a tiny computer implanted in the body. If this microcomputer worked, it would be a boon to the 20 percent of epileptic patients - about 300,000 in the United States - who do not respond adequately to drugs or surgery.

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The device was invented by Jacob Zabara, a Temple University physiologist. It is attached to the vagus nerve, a major nerve leading to the brain.

Zabara had found through animal experiments that periodic electrical stimulation seemed to suppress the abnormal electrical discharges in the brain that constitute a seizure.

He did not know why this should stop seizures, any more than physicians know how infections, blows to the head or other damage to the brain can lead to epilepsy. (Rich developed his epilepsy after contracting viral meningitis as an infant.)

After some encouraging experiments on dogs and monkeys in 1984 and 1985, the microcomputer was tested on 14 epileptic patients in a pilot study in 1988. Three of the patients stopped having seizures altogether, and others showed reductions in the number of seizures they did have.

This was promising, but the number of patients was far too small to prove that the device was effective. So it was decided to undertake an international study involving 120 patients treated in 19 medical centers here and abroad.