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We read with great interest the study by Thabit et al. on non-epileptic paroxysmal events in Egyptian children [1]. We applaud the authors (first study from Africa) for describing a large cohort of 171 children with non-epileptic events, constituting 19.5% of those with initial diagnosis of suspected epilepsy. Breath-holding spells were the commonest events in nearly one-third of patients (71% girls), followed by syncope and psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) [1]. However, we agree that the proportion of each non-epileptic event seen in this study may not represent the true picture in the community since the denominator in this study consisted of those with initial diagnosis of suspected epilepsy instead of all non-epileptic events.