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First described in the 18th century, the clinical definition of ‘absence seizure’ has undergone frequent revisions to become the entity we are familiar with today [1]. In 1935, Gibbs and colleagues provided EEG description of a smooth and approximately sinusoidal shaped wave with a sharp negative spike allowing absence seizures to be differentiated from other seizure types associated with impairment of consciousness [2]. Further description of this spike-wave (SW) complex and its association with absence seizures was later provided by Weir [3].