Seizure Mimickers in Pediatric Age Group (Children’s Medical Center Experience)

Seizure disorders are not uncommon in pediatric age group, but seizure like disorders or seizure mimickers are definitely more common than seizure per se. It is a universal quote in pediatric epileptology that diagnosis of epilepsy in children is made after exclusion of other similar seizure mimickers . Epilepsy has an overall incidence of 0.5-1% in children which depends mainly on different pediatric age group. Some conditions such as tics have a cumulative incidence of more than 30% which is pretty more common than seizure disorders. It’s estimated that about 25% of patients who are referred to our outpatient clinics with the diagnosis of epilepsy have epilepsy like disorders in fact. The figures are the same in patients admitted to our epilepsy monitoring unit (EMU). Amongst our patients with seizure like disorders, patients with parasomnias (e.g night terror, somnambulism, and somniloquy) are more common. In my talk I’ll address on interesting cases of seizure like disorders from our clinic and discuss on them in more detail.

Keywords:

Seizure like disorders in children , epilepsy mimickers in pediatric age group , pediatric epilepsy clinic , pediatric EMU , LTM