Parkinson's disease: Less epileptic seizures more status epilepticus

Abstract

We compared the rate of epilepsy and status epilepticus (SE) in patients with and without Parkinson's disease (PD). Out of 1215 patients with idiopathic PD, 31 had epilepsy and 19 of these had at least one episode of SE (61.3%) compared to 298 of 2537 patients (11.7%; p<0.001) with epilepsy and without concomitant PD. This clinical finding supports the hypothesis that the functional impairment of the basal ganglia in PD patients makes SE more likely.