UMC Utrecht has appointed neurologist Maeike Zijlmans as Professor of Advanced Neurophysiology in Epilepsy Surgery effective April 1, 2022. The new chair, which falls under the Brain spearhead, strengthens the collaboration between UMC Utrecht and SEIN, expertise center for epilepsy and sleep medicine. The chair is funded by EpilepsieNL, which works every day for the community of people with epilepsy and their surroundings.
Maeike Zijlmans trained as a neurologist in Utrecht and obtained her PhD on different methods to find the source of epilepsy. After her doctoral research, she worked for a year in Montreal, where she came into contact with so-called ‘high-frequency oscillations’: a signal that can recently be filtered out of brain movies, and which can be used to detect the epilepsy hotspot. Zijlmans took the knowledge she gained in Montreal back to Utrecht in 2009.
The brand-new professor aims to develop new technologies to improve epilepsy surgery. These include hardware, such as advanced electrode grids that can better measure brain signals. And to software, to better analyze and integrate the electrographic data neurologists collect before, during and after surgery with other information such as MRI and metabolic imaging.
Epilepsy affects about 1 percent of the population. Nevertheless, the field is in a vicious cycle, Zijlmans says. That’s because the success rate of epilepsy surgery is not very high, at about 50 to 70 percent. “Someone who’s doing well on medication, you’re not going to operate at this point,” Zijlmans says. “Therefore, surgery is now a last resort. This causes us to gain little knowledge, which prevents us from improving our treatments properly. Meanwhile, we know that people with epilepsy, even apart from seizures, live shorter and less pleasant lives. Epilepsy has a negative impact on memory, for example, and the condition obviously has a huge social impact.”
Zijlmans would like to break the vicious cycle. “If we can improve the success rate of epilepsy surgery, more operations will be performed. We learn a lot from that, which further increases the chance of success. Moreover, it then becomes more interesting for the industry to develop new technologies that in turn contribute to better operations.” In this way, the new professor foresees, there is a world to be won. “If we can cure epilepsy at a young age, at a time when the condition is not yet so complex, that has a long-term impact on the quality of life of people who would otherwise suffer from it for a lifetime.”
Maeike Zijlmans’ professorship is funded by EpilepsieNL, which works every day for the community of 200,000 Dutch people with epilepsy and their environment. The new chair strengthens the collaboration with SEIN, expertise center for epilepsy and sleep medicine, where Zijlmans also works. Both organizations are important partners in the field. The collaboration with SEIN will lead, among other things, to more shared internships for master’s students and physicians in training for the neurology specialization. Knowledge will also be shared that will benefit UMC Utrecht, Utrecht University and SEIN.
