Benign childhood focal seizures and related idiopathic epileptic syndromes affect 25% of children with non-febrile seizures and constitute a significant part of the everyday practice of paediatricians, neurologists and electroencephalographers. They comprise three identifiable electroclinical syndromes recognised by the International League against Epilepsy (ILAE)1: rolandic epilepsy which is w...

Childhood absence epilepsy (CAE) and benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BCECTS), or benign rolandic epilepsy (BRE), are the most common forms of childhood epilepsy. CAE and BCECTS are well-known and clearly defined syndromes; although they are strongly dissimilar in terms of their pathophysiology, these functional epileptic disturbances share many features such as similar age...

Benign adult familial myoclonus epilepsy (BAFME) is an adult onset, autosomal dominant disease characterized by cortical tremor and infrequent generalized seizures. BAFME was considered as non-progressive, but cortical tremor worsened in some of the aged patients. We investigated the disease progression of BAFME. Cortical tremor significantly worsened and amplitudes of giant somatosensory evoke...

We have generated an experimental 'double-hit' model of chronic epilepsy to recapitulate the co-existence of abnormal cortical structure and frequently recurrent seizures as observed in human focal cortical dysplasia. We induced cortical malformations by exposing rats prenatally to methylazoxymethanol acetate and triggered status epilepticus and recurrent seizures in adult methylazoxymethanol a...

The authors retrospectively explored cortical differences between 26 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy and psychosis of epilepsy (POE), 24 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) alone, and 20 healthy comparison subjects. Using voxel-based morphometry based on statistical parametric mapping (SPM99), which is an unbiased and fully automated technique to test for morphometric differences, m...

About 80% of paediatric intractable epilepsy patients have accompanying cortical dysplasia. However, there are no established methods for noninvasive detection of cortical dysplasia. This paper proposes a novel method for automatically detecting cortical dysplasia using paediatric MR images. In order to evaluate cortical dysplasia in MR images, texture features and fractal dimension were extrac...