Epilepsy treatment device implanted in patient's skull for first time

British teenager Oran Knowlson has become the world's first patient with severe epilepsy to have a special device implanted in his skull to combat the symptoms of the disease, the BBC reports .

According to the publication, the implantation operation was performed in a London hospital when Knowlson was 12 years old. He is now 13.

He suffered from severe, treatment-resistant epilepsy from the age of three. He had between several dozen and two hundred seizures a day. According to Knowlson's mother, the disease robbed him of his childhood.

After the implantation, the teenager's condition improved significantly. According to the BBC, the number of daily seizures decreased by 80%. This effect was achieved thanks to the electrical impulses that the device sends deep into the brain, blocking the signals that cause seizures.

In January 2024, billionaire Elon Musk's company Neuralink announced that it had successfully implanted a chip into the brain of a paralyzed person for the first time. Musk himself wrote at the time that the patient was "recovering well" after the surgery, and the billionaire called the initial results of the chip's testing "promising."

Previously, Musk wrote that the chip in question, after being implanted into a person’s brain, would allow him, “just by thinking,” to control a phone and a computer, and through them, “almost any device.”

Neuralink presented the results of testing this device on a monkey back in 2021. At that time, the company published a video in which the animal plays a computer game “with the power of thought.”

Three months after announcing the successful implant, Neuralinkreleased a video of its patient playing chess by sending commands to a computer using a device implanted in his skull.

The patient himself, whose name is Nolan Arbaugh, said he was discharged on the second day after the chip implantation surgery. According to him, the operation has already changed his life.

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