Accurately diagnosing sleep-related events, and particularly distinguishing nocturnal frontal lobe seizures from other sleep disorders such as parasomnias, can be challenging. This article reviews the differential diagnosis of paroxysmal events from sleep, epileptic and non-epileptic, considers important diagnostic points in the history, and evaluates the role of investigations in this setting.

Evidence increasingly suggests sleep disorders are associated with higher risk of cardiovascular events, including stroke. Strong data correlate untreated sleep apnea with poorer stroke outcomes and more recent evidence implicates sleep disruption as a possible etiology for increased cerebrovascular events. Also, sleep duration may affect incidence of cardiovascular events. In addition, sleep-d...

BACKGROUND Pediatric sleep research is rather new in Estonia. There has not been a comprehensive study of age specific sleep disorders in Estonian children. The aim of this study was to investigate sleep disorders in a sample of Estonian second grade children.We hypothesized that:: Children with low BMI are as susceptible to SDB as are children with high BMI. Under weight children are susceptib...

Sleep architecture and polysomnographic findings show that the majority of sleepwalking episodes occur during slow-wave sleep (SWS). Although genetics play an important role in the manifestation of sleepwalking, recent studies have shown that parasomnias are also associated with other sleep or mental disorders and psychological factors. Sleepwalking prevalence rates are higher in childhood than...

Sleep disorders in children and adolescents is a topic that has been, and remains, neglected in both public health education and professional training. Although much knowledge has been accumulated in recent times, it has been poorly disseminated and, therefore, relatively little is put into practice. Only some general issues can be discussed in this article. The aspects chosen relate mainly to ...

It is common for general physicians to experience diagnostic doubt and trepidation whenever faced with patients who exhibit abnormal nocturnal behaviours or excessive movements at night. There is also a perception that expensive and often poorly available overnight tests are usually required for diagnostic precision. In fact, the majority of conditions, whether they be parasomnias or, more rare...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationship between specific television-viewing habits and both sleep habits and sleep disturbances in school children. METHODS The parents of 495 children in grades kindergarten through fourth grade in three public elementary schools completed two retrospective survey questionnaires, one assessing their children's sleep behaviors and the other examining televisi...

BACKGROUND Children with Down syndrome (DS) suffer from sleep problems, including sleep maintenance problems, as well as snoring, and other symptoms of disordered breathing. To examine sleep in DS, we gave parents a questionnaire assessing their child's sleep. MATERIALS AND METHODS The parents of 35 children with DS (mean age = 12.65 years, range = 7-18 years) completed the 33-item Children's...

Bruxism in children has been reported to occur in association with certain parasomnias (i.e., sleep talking, bed wetting). Various dental, medical, neurological, and psychological risk factors also have been correlated with bruxism. A case-control study was therefore conducted to test the null hypothesis that there is no difference between bruxers and nonbruxers in the occurrence rate of other ...

System epilepsy is an emerging concept interpreting major nonlesional epilepsies as epileptic dysfunctions of physiological systems. I extend here the concept of reflex epilepsy to epilepsies linked to input dependent physiological systems. Experimental and clinical reseach data were collected to create a coherent explanation of underlying pathomechanism in AE and NFLE. We propose that AE shoul...