OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of the ketogenic diet in Indian children with uncontrolled epilepsy. STUDY DESIGN Prospective observational study. SETTING Hospital based. PATIENTS 105 children (age 4 months to 18 years) with uncontrolled epilepsy enrolled in the ketogenic diet program over a period of 9 years and followed up for 25.7+/- 20.3 months (median:17 months) on the ketogenic d...

The experiments which led to the discovery of the crossing sensory pathways in the spinal cord, and made Charles-ltdouard Brown-Sequard (1817-1894) famous, established the basis of his theories on the origin of epilepsy. This work is not well-known, but Brown-Sequard's spinal epilepsy remained a clinical entity until the beginning of the twentieth century. He observed that spinal epilepsy could...

Analysis of electroencephalographic signals and several brain imaging studies suggest that a preictal state precedes the onset of seizures. In this study, we used phenomenological strategies to detect modifications in patients' experience before their seizures. We observed that patients with partial epilepsy feeling an aura (n=9) frequently experienced prodromes (n=6). Prodromes were subtle pre...

The notion of a level of consciousness is a key construct in the science of consciousness. Not only is the term employed to describe the global states of consciousness that are associated with post-comatose disorders, epileptic absence seizures, anaesthesia, and sleep, it plays an increasingly influential role in theoretical and methodological contexts. However, it is far from clear what precis...

Epilepsy is, apart from sleep, the essential human experience of what looks like a violent, dramatic but transient form of death, a death a person can recover from. This makes epilepsy interesting in Indo-European tradition where rebirth in its various forms is an established concept. This paper interprets an illumination of the Middle Ages and comments on the promise made to a fallen person wi...

The results of the Epilepsia poll on the use of medical marijuana (MMJ) and cannabidiol (CBD) reveal a striking difference in the assessment of the safety and efficacy between epileptologists and patients. In our review, we highlighted the limited evidence supporting MMJ and CBD to treat epilepsy and acknowledged the encouraging preclinical evidence and calling for rigorous research, a view ech...

Measurement of synchrony in networks of complex or high-dimensional, nonstationary, and noisy systems such as the mammalian brain is technically difficult. We present a general method to analyze synchrony from multichannel time series. The idea is to calculate the phase-synchronization times and to construct a matrix. We develop a random-matrix-based criterion for proper choosing of the diagona...

PURPOSE To assess the perception of epilepsy stigma in different regions of Brazil. METHOD The Stigma Scale of Epilepsy (SSE) questionnaire was applied to people in different Brazilian urban settings. The survey was performed on individual basis; an interviewer read the questions to the subjects and wrote down the answers. The same procedure was applied to all the subjects and took around 10 ...

Occipital intermittent rhythmic delta activity (OIRDA) is considered good prognostic factor in typical absences (TA). We report electroclinical evolution in 14 patients with TA and OIRDA, which performed video-EEG. Seven patients were female; 9 had childhood absence epilepsy and the others did not present electroclinical characteristics for syndromic classification according to ILAE's classific...