Brain plasticity in children after hemispherectomy

Continuing with my response to Dev's comment to the last post, here's more info on what happens to kids that have one hemisphere completely removed:

"There are cases, however, in which the affected part of the brain [in epilepsy] is quite large, the seizures completely unmanageable, and the only recourse is radical surgery. Since severe chronic epilepsy due to brain lesions is usually first diagnosed in young children, it is such children who are the usual patients in radical brain surgery for epilepsy. The most radical and fairly common procedure is hemispherectomy, removal of an entire half of the brain, and the most remarkable aspect of this is that when the surgical procedure is successful, not only are the seizures eliminated, but the child can function as well or almost as well as any other child. It is an example of a phenomenon well-known to neuro-biologists called "brain plasticity", the ability of the brain to recover the function of a damaged or removed region by assignment of the function to an undamaged location. The language area of the brain, for example, is often considered to be fixed on the left side of the brain by genetics, but in truth it is not so fixed, and if the left side of the brain is removed at an early age, the right side of the brain will quickly develop a language center and there will be little functional impairment. In a recent publication, Eileen P. G. Vining (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD US) reports the progress of 54 children who underwent hemispherectomy for recurrent severe epileptic seizures. The majority of the patients were seizure-free following surgery, no longer needed drugs, and many of the patients are now in school. One of the most significant facts about the human brain is that its histological development continues at least until adolescence, and the dynamism of this histological development is what is responsible for its remarkable plasticity. QY: E. Vining, Johns Hopkins University (410) 516-8171. (Pediatrics August 1997)."