PURPOSE Document the frequency, types and risk factors for injuries caused by seizures for people with childhood onset epilepsy. METHOD We contacted patients with all types of epilepsy except childhood absence from the Nova Scotia Childhood Epilepsy population-based cohort. Seizure onset was between 1977 and 1985. Patients and parents were asked about serious injuries resulting from a seizure...

Stress is known to trigger seizures in patients with epilepsy, highlighting the physiological stress response as a possible therapeutic target for epilepsy treatment. Nevertheless, little is currently known about how a genetic predisposition to epilepsy interacts with the stress response to influence seizure outcome. To address this question, we examined the effect of acute stress on seizure ou...

introduction: febrile seizure is the most common problem in pediatric neurology that occur s in 3– 4% of children. the purpose of this study was to evaluate demographic and clinical characteristics of first febrile seizures in children admitted to the hospital. methods: in a descriptive retrospective study, medical records of children with first febrile seizure, admitted between march 2004and a...

A 7-year-old boy presented to a community hospital with vomiting and abdominal pain. His past medical history was remarkable for an anaphylactic reaction to penicillin and a long-standing absence seizure disorder, which was well-controlled on phenytoin. The patient had been well until 9 days prior to presentation when he was seen in the nurse’s office at his school after an apparent absence sei...

The mechanisms by which valproate, one of the most widely prescribed anti-epileptic drugs, suppresses seizures have not been fully elucidated but may involve up-regulation of neuropeptide Y (NPY). We investigated the effects of valproate treatment in Genetic Absence Epilepsy Rats from Strasbourg (GAERS) on brain NPY mRNA expression and seizure control. GAERS were administered either valproate (...

Status epilepticus (SE) is one of the most common emergencies in neurocritical care. In Germany, the incidence of SE is about 17/100 000 per year, increasing with age [1]. Especially generalized convulsive (tonic-clonic) status epilepticus (GCSE) is still associated with a high risk of morbidity and mortality [2]. SE is defined as a single prolonged seizure or a series of two or more consecutiv...

In recent years, an increasing number of studies have investigated the effects of closed-loop anti-epileptic treatments. Most of the current research still is very labour intensive: real-time treatment is manually triggered and conclusions can only be drawn after multiple days of manual review and annotation of the electroencephalogram (EEG). In this paper we propose a technique based on reserv...

The recommended treatment for juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) is valproate (VPA). Recently, topiramate and lamotrigine have also been shown to be effective. The objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy and tolerability of zonisamide (ZNS) in the treatment of JME. We retrospectively analyzed the records of 15 patients (three M, 12 F, ages 11-20 years) diagnosed with JME at our inst...

AIM To determine the efficacy of the ketogenic diet for children with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome (LGS) at our institution and in the literature. METHOD The records of children with LGS initiated on the ketogenic diet at our institution from 1994 to 2010 were reviewed. Inclusion criteria included the presence of ≤2.5Hz spike-and-wave complexes on electroencephalogram, multiple seizure types inclu...

OBJECTIVE To find out incidence of seizure recurrence and its risk factor after the first unprovoked attack in children below 12 years of age. METHODS A prospective study was carried out between 30th April 1996 - 1st May 1997 with the aim to find out the incidence of seizure recurrence and its risk factor after the first unprovoked attack in children below 12 years of age. All patients aged b...