Epilepsia. Official Journal of the International League Against Epilepsy

To evaluate health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and emotional well-being in resective epilepsy surgery and nonoperated patients at long-term follow-up.

This is a prospective cohort study where patients undergoing presurgical work-up during 1995–1998 completed the Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HAD) at baseline, and 2 and 14 years after resective surgery or presurgical evaluation (nonoperated patients). SF-36 scores were compared to a normative population. Proportions of patients reaching HRQOL changes of minimum ...

To evaluate health-related quality of life (HRQOL) and emotional well-being in resective epilepsy surgery and nonoperated patients at long-term follow-up.

This is a prospective cohort study where patients undergoing presurgical work-up during 1995–1998 completed the Short-Form Health Survey (SF-36) and the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HAD) at baseline, and 2 and 14 years after resective surgery or presurgical evaluation (nonoperated patients). SF-36 scores were compared to a normative population. Proportions of patients reaching HRQOL changes of minimum ...

In 2011, the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) proposed a consensus classification system of focal cortical dysplasia (FCD) to distinguish clinicopathological subtypes, for example, “isolated” FCD type Ia–c and IIa–b, versus “associated” FCD type IIIa–d. The histopathological differentiation of FCD type I and III variants remains, however, a challenging issue in everyday practice. We present a unique histopathological pattern in patients with difficult-to-diagnose FCD, which highlights this dilemma, but also helps to refine the current ILAE classification ...

Epilepsy is a common neurologic disorder resulting in spontaneous, recurrent seizures. About 30–40% of patients are not responsive to pharmacologic therapies. This may be due to the differences between individual patients such as etiology, underlying pathophysiology, and seizure focus, and it highlights the importance of new drug discovery and testing in this field. Our goal was to determine the efficacy of lacosamide (LCM), a drug approved for the treatment of focal seizures, in a model of generalized ...

Mesial temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) is a severe neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. mTLE is frequently accompanied by neurodegeneration in the hippocampus resulting in hippocampal sclerosis (HS), the most common morphological correlate of drug resistance in mTLE patients. Incomplete knowledge of pathological changes in mTLE+HS complicates its therapy. The pathological mechanism underlying mTLE+HS may involve abnormal gene expression regulation, including posttranscriptional networks involving microRNAs (miRNAs). miRNA expression deregulation has been reported in various disorders, including epilepsy. ...

This study aimed to analyze the retention rate of lacosamide (LCM) in patients with epilepsy and intellectual disabilities (IDs), to identify factors influencing retention rate, and to investigate the LCM retention rate with and without concomitant sodium channel blocker (SCB). We hypothesized that the retention rate of LCM with concomitant SCB would be lower than without SCB.

Using the Kaplan-Meier estimator, we conducted a monocentric, retrospective, observational, open-label study to evaluate LCM retention rates in patients with ...

To analyze the attitude and results of Italian epilepsy surgery centers in the surgical management of “low grade epilepsy associated neuroepithelial tumors” (LEATs).

We conducted a retrospective study enrolling 339 consecutive patients with LEATs who underwent surgery between January 2009 and June 2015 at eight Italian epilepsy surgery centers. We compared demographic, clinical, pathologic, and surgical features of patients with favorable (Engel class I) and unfavorable (Engel class II, III, and IV) seizure outcome. In addition, we ...

It is now well appreciated that benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BECTS, or more recently, ECTS) is associated with a range of cognitive and behavioral disturbances. Despite our improved understanding of cognitive functioning in ECTS, there have been to date no efforts to quantitatively synthesize the available literature within a comprehensive cognitive framework.

The present systematic review and meta-analysis was conducted according to PRISMA guidelines. Forty-two case–control samples met eligibility criteria comprising a total of 1,237 children ...