Delineating cortical networks underlying epileptic encephalopathy and cognitive impairment with PET: a perspective.

Sometimes childhood epilepsy may present with an acute onset of catastrophic seizures, rapidly progressing to intractable status epilepticus with poor outcome. One such example is postencephalitic epilepsy (1), which is a rare epileptic condition and is characterized by different names, such as acute encephalitis with refractory repetitive partial seizures (2), idiopathic catastrophic epileptic encephalopathy (3), devastating epileptic encephalopathy in school-age children (4), or febrile infection-related epilepsy syndrome (5). Postencephalitic epilepsy occurs in previously healthy children after a short febrile illness, followed by acute onset of treatmentresistant seizures that develop into