Continuous Spike-Wave in Slow Wave Sleep (CSWS) Mimicking Dementia in a 55-Year-Old Man with Intellectual Disability

Diagnostics is cumbersome in intellectually disabled patients experiencing neuropsychiatric symptoms because of overlapping disorders and also because of the age-dependent terminology. In adults conditions leading to cognitive decline are called dementia, whereas during childhood or adolescence years the resulting condition is called intellectual disability (ID) even though the causes of dementia and those of IDs do overlap. Continuous spike-wave in slow sleep syndrome (CSWSS) represents a rare childhood epileptic encephalopathy the typical EEG pattern of which is traditionally thought to resolve before the teenage. In this paper we describe a middle-aged patient with cerebral palsy and mild ID whose long-lasting neuropsychiatric symptoms were mistaken as dementia (in spite of an informative EEGfinding) until the possibility of CSWS was considered and clobazam was found to result in full