Background: The purpose of this study was to better characterize the features of early and late-onset epilepsy in individuals with autism. Methods: We reviewed the charts of all patients with autism referred to Shiga University Hospital between 2002 and 2012. Patients who were identified as having epilepsy were examined, and they were divided into two groups according to the age of seizure onse...

Epilepsy is one of the most common serious neurologic conditions. It is characterized by the tendency to have recurrent seizures, which arise against a backdrop of apparently normal brain activity. At present, clinical diagnosis relies on the following: (1) case history, which can be unreliable; (2) observation of transient abnormal activity during electroencephalography (EEG), which may not be...

Recurrently and abnormally hypersynchronous discharge is a striking feature of idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging has revealed aberrant spontaneous brain synchronization, predominately in low-frequency range (<0.1 Hz), in individuals with IGE. Little is known, however, about these changes in local synchronization across different frequency...

Fifty consecutive and consenting epilepsy patients from the Zagreb Epilepsy Center were examined for the presence of depressive symptoms using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). This questionnaire has been previously validated for use in the Croatian population. Mean age of the patients was 30.8 +/- 13.5 years, 60.4% were females. Majority of them were employed (72.9%) and single (62.5%), and...

A 35-year-old man, followed due to idiopathic generalized epilepsy, presented heterochromia (eyes of two different colours), together with anisocoria (condition in which the left pupil is smaller than the right pupil). The anisocoria became more pronounced in the dark. The patient reported that his eyes had been of different colours ever since he could remember. A diagnosis of idiopathic congen...

BACKGROUND The term, "triphasic wave" originally described an EEG pattern believed to be a marker for a specific stage of hepatic coma. For 4 decades, the diagnostic and prognostic specificity of the pattern remains controversial. Its pathophysiology also continues to be elusive. METHODS EEG recordings were obtained in three patients known or suspected to have primary generalized epilepsy. In...

Heterozygous mutations in the CLCN2 gene encoding the voltage-gated chloride channel CLC2 have been identified in patients with idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). Yet the involvement of CLCN2 in epilepsy remains controversial. To investigate the involvement of CLCN2 in another independent sample, we screened 52 unrelated patients from IGE families and 23 patients with Doose syndrome for mut...

An 8-year-old child presented with history of fainting attacks while playing, which lasted for a few seconds, followed by spontaneous recovery. He had two such witnessed episodes in the preceding week, which prompted the present consultation. He was developing normally, studied in class III, and never had any previous episodes of dizziness, syncope, breathlessness or cyanosis. He did not report...

PURPOSE In vitro or in animal models of epilepsy, ghrelin showed a clear anticonvulsant action, whose mechanisms are somewhat obscure. In humans however, a controversial relation exists between ghrelin and epilepsy. Yet most studies investigated just total ghrelin levels, without a proper distinction between acylated (AG) or unacylated ghrelin (UAG). We thus evaluated separately AG and UAG inte...

Vigabatrin (VGB) may aggravate clinical seizures and epileptiform discharges especially in the patients with generalized epilepsy. This report is about the repetitive appearance of generalized spike-and-wave complexes in a patient with focal epilepsy. Though there were constant appearances of the generalized epileptiform discharges on the consecutive electroencephalograms (EEGs) taken over appr...