Pediatric epileptiform encephalopathies are a group of neurologically devastating disorders related to uncontrolled ictal and interictal epileptic activity, with a poor prognosis. Despite the number of pharmacological options for treatment of epilepsy, many of these patients are drug resistant. For these patients with uncontrolled epilepsy, motor and/or neuropsychological deterioration is commo...

The effects of a brief hypoxic episode on synaptic activity in the CA1 region of the hippocampus were studied using the in vitro slice prepared from dietary Mg-deficient mouse. After 5 min of hypoxia, the synaptically evoked population spike was increased in amplitude and developed to an epileptiform discharge. The induction of the epileptiform discharge following hypoxia was prevented in the p...

About one-quarter of patients with refractory focal epilepsies have frontal lobe epilepsy (FLE). The typical seizure semiology for FLE includes unilateral clonic, tonic asymmetric or hypermotor seizures. Interictal electroencephalograms (EEG) usually reveal interictal epileptiform discharges and rhythmical midline theta, which has localizing value. The usefulness of ictal EEG recordings is limi...

In a prospective study of consecutive patients (age 15 or over) with transient loss of consciousness 45 patients had a history of seizure and 74 patients had a history of syncope. All patients had an EEG, ECG, laboratory tests and a hyperventilation test and were followed for an average of 14.5 months. Epileptiform activity in the interictal EEG had a sensitivity of 0.40 and a specificity of 0....

A system is proposed which enhances transient nonstationarities and, in particular, epileptiform discharges in the EEG. It is based around the technique of multireference adaptive noise cancelling (MRANC) which attenuates the background EEG on a primary channel by using spatial and temporal information from adjacent channels in the multichannel EEG recording. This process has been implemented b...

The diagnosis of epilepsy generally includes a visual inspection of EEG recorded data by the Neurologist, with the purpose of checking the occurrence of transient waveforms called interictal epileptiform discharges. These waveforms have short duration (less than 100 ms), so the inspection process is usually time-consuming, particularly for ambulatory long-term EEG records. Therefore, an automat...