PURPOSE Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) is used increasingly as adjunctive therapy for refractory epilepsy. Studies of VNS in children report mainly seizure frequency reduction as a measure of efficacy and clinical details are often scanty. We report our experience with VNS in children with refractory epilepsy and emphasize the positive effects of VNS in terms of seizure severity. METHODS We re...

Seizure control is often affected by seizure threshold lowering behaviours. In this case report, the authors address excessive caffeine ingestion from tea with increased seizure frequency. When decaffeinated beverages were substituted for the tea, seizure frequency returned to baseline. Similar findings occurred when the patient was re-challenged. The authors recommend avoidance of excessive ca...

UNLABELLED This study was designed to describe the course of epilepsy (in terms of seizure frequency) and to assess the variables (antiepileptic therapy regimens and others) correlated to improvement. Seizure frequency (categories: seizure free, more than one seizure/year, monthly seizures, weekly seizures and daily seizures) and antiepileptic medication were retrospectively compared between 19...

The aim of this retrospective study is to describe changes of seizure frequency in epilepsy patients who participated in the Andrews/Reiter behavioral intervention for epilepsy. For this uncontrolled retrospective study, data were extracted from patients' medical journals. Intention-to-treat-analyses were restricted to patients with sufficient documentation supporting a diagnosis of probable or...

High frequency oscillations have been proposed as a clinically useful biomarker of seizure generating sites. We used a unique set of human microelectrode array recordings (four patients, 10 seizures), in which propagating seizure wavefronts could be readily identified, to investigate the basis of ictal high frequency activity at the cortical (subdural) surface. Sustained, repetitive transient i...

Acquired epilepsy (i.e., after an insult to the brain) is often considered to be a progressive disorder, and the nature of this hypothetical progression remains controversial. Antiepileptic drug treatment necessarily confounds analyses of progressive changes in human patients with acquired epilepsy. Here, we describe experiments testing the hypothesis that development of acquired epilepsy begin...

High frequency oscillations have been proposed as a clinically useful biomarker of seizure generating sites. We used a unique set of human microelectrode array recordings (four patients, 10 seizures), in which propagating seizure wavefronts could be readily identified, to investigate the basis of ictal high frequency activity at the cortical (subdural) surface. Sustained, repetitive transient i...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the suppressive effect of electric cortical stimulation upon the seizure onset zone and the non-epileptic cortex covered by subdural electrodes in patients with neocortical epilepsy and mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). METHODS Four patients with medically intractable focal epilepsy had implanted subdural electrodes for preoperative evaluation. Cortical functional ma...

post-traumatic epileptic seizure is a common complication of brain trauma including military injuries. we present clinical characteristics and correlates of post-traumatic epilepsy in 163 head-injured veterans suffering from intractable epilepsy due to blunt or penetrating head injuries sustained during the iraq-iran war. the medical records of 163 war veterans who were admitted by the epilepsy...