Researchers recently published an article in The Lancet Neurology discussing the difficulties facing seizure detection in patients with epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that is characterized by short repetitive epileptic seizures. These seizures can be harmful to the individual depending on the circumstances in which they occur, such as a seizure while driving. This disorder is set apart from other neurological disorders since there is a broad range of different physiological changes that can cause it, leading to a large variation in symptoms and making it difficult to treat. While 70% of sufferers can be treated with pharmacological agents, 30% have no reliable anti-epileptic drugs that are effective for their particular type of epilepsy.
In a recent study, Christian Elger and Christian Hoppe determined that a key challenge facing patients is that over 50% of patients under-report the number of seizures they experience, which has a serious impact on how well doctors are able to determine what treatments are most suitable for them. This also calls into question many of the previously published research on epilepsy treatments. They recently published this report in The Lancet Neurology.