Absence Status Epilepticus: EEG findings and clinical follow-up

Abstract

Fifteen cases with a diagnosis of absence status epilepticus (ASE) were included in this study. Tbe mean age was 15.4 ± 9.5, and 8 of the patients were women. Before the ASE episode, there was a history of epilepsy in only 8 patients. On the EEG's which revealed the diagnosis of ASE, the epileptic discharges were continuous in 7 patients, whereas in 8, there were normal intervals lasting 1-14 seconds. In 4 of the patients the abnormalities were irregular The frequencies of the discharges were varying between 1.5-3.5 Hz. Among the patients with multiple spikes, we observed prominent eyelid blinking and/or generalized myoclonia in all but one. IV Clonazepam was used in 11 cases, 9 of whom showed a dramatic improvement of clinical and/or EEG findings. In 1O cases with a minimum follow-up of 3 years, classification of the epileptic syndrome was made. Two of them had childhood absence epilepsy, one bad juvenile absence epilepsy, 2 had juvenile myoclonic epilepsy and one had myoclonic astatic epilepsy. in another patient, the syndrome of "eyelid myoclonia with absences" was diagnosed, which is not recognizedin the current classification. The remaining 3 patients had unclassified idiopathic generalized epilepsies characterized by the recurrent ASE attacks. ln only 2 of the patients the anti-epileptic drugs could be withdrawn. Our study shows that ASE can recur, there may be some cases which could not classified easily according to the knownepileptic syndromes, and there can be a prominent variation in the EEG findings among cases.