Study Highlights Potential Benefits of Continuous EEG Monitoring for Infant Patients

December 14, 2018

A recent retrospective study evaluating continuous electroencephalography (cEEG) of children in intensive care units (ICUs) found a higher than anticipated number of seizures. The work also identified several conditions closely associated with the seizures, and suggests that cEEG monitoring may be a valuable tool for helping to identify and treat neurological problems in patients who are 14 months old or younger.

EEGs measure electrical activity in the brain, and are often used to detect potential neurological problems. Conventional EEGs usually last less than an hour, but cEEGs allow health care providers to monitor brain activity for hours or days. However, cEEGs are not in widespread use, due to the expense of related hardware and software and costs associated with having the skilled personnel needed to monitor and interpret cEEG data.

“Our main finding is the unexpectedly high prevalence of mostly non-symptomatic seizures in very young children,” says Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial Engineering and the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech. “Non-symptomatic seizures are those that can be detected with an EEG, but that do not present any outward, physical symptoms. Children over the age of 14 months had an overall seizure rate of 18 percent. However, we found that children aged 14 months and younger had an overall seizure rate of 45 percent.”

“In addition, we found that – for these younger patients – seizures were often associated with one of the following conditions: hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, intracranial hemorrhage or central nervous system infection,” says Dr. Larry Olson of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University.