Short duration outpatient video electroencephalographic monitoring: The experience of a southern‐Italian general pediatric department

Abstract

ABSTRACT The authors assessed the event detection rate and clinical usefulness of short duration, outpatient video electroencephalographic monitoring (VEM), in the pediatric age group. The duration of monitoring was set at a two‐hour period. One hundred consecutive patients aged 0‐18 years were enrolled in the study. Patients belonged to one of the following groups: A) patients evaluated to differentiate between true epileptic seizures and nonepileptic events; B) patients with known epilepsy evaluated for a better definition of their seizure type; C) patients with isolated EEG abnormalities evaluated to identify unrecognised, subtle seizures. An additional group D, included patients with enhancement of spike activity induced by sleep. Eighty‐seven patients experienced at least one event per week and 13% had less than one event weekly. The event detection rate was 53% overall, and 61% in the first group of 87 patients. In patients who had events recorded and characterized, epileptic seizures were identified in 37 children (69.8%), and non‐epileptic events in 19 children (35.8%). Diagnostic yield was especially high in children with mental retardation who had predominantly non‐epileptic events. VEM was judged successful and/or informative in 73 cases (73%), and turned out to be useful even in patients with a low baseline frequency of clinical events.