PREDICTIVE MODELS TO ESTIMATE THE RISK OF DEVELOPING EPILEPSY IN CHILDREN
Background: Infant epilepsy represents a major cause of pediatric morbidity, being frequent in infants and small children, and often difficult to detect, the- reby conducting to psychomotor decline. Objectives: We aimed to assess clinical, diagnosis and treatment peculiarities of epilepsy in small children in or- der to determine the most common forms of the disease through the modern classification of epilepsies and epileptic syndromes. Materials and methods: We assessed clinical and paraclinical peculiarities in 61 patients (7.7%; 95CI 6.76 – 8.66) aged between 1 month to 3 years, with supposed diagnosis of epilepsy. We also analyzed the results of paraclinical investigations (neuroimaging and electroencephalographic) which are important in improving the diagnosis of epilepsy. Results: Our results highlight the prevalence of symptomatic forms of epilepsy (85.2%) and the presence of neurodevelopmental disorders (82%). The electroencephalographic examination determined a high variability of patterns: generalized discharges, typical and modified hypsar- rhythmia, sharp and slow waves, polymorphic hypervolted waves, slow-wave poly-spike, polymorphic average waves, focal peak-wave, spikes, polyspikes. Imaging arrays were characterized by the following aspects: cortical atrophy, atrophic hydrocephalus, cystic formations, glicotic formations, hypogene- sis of corpus callosum, cortical tubers, ventriculomegaly, Dandy-Walker anomaly, hemispheric asymmetry, venous malformation, ischemic processes. Conclusions: Epilepsy is a major cause of pediatric morbidity with an increased frequency in infants (77%). Epilepsies correlate with the following disorders: psycho-verbal (rxy=0.22), psychomotor (rxy = 0.29) and mixed neurodevelopmental disorders (rxy = 0.67). Electroencephalographic examination is appropri- ate in the diagnosis of epilepsies in the early stages. The imaging arrays of frequent epilepsies are characterized by structural brain changes. The frequency of epileptic seizures was reduced by monotherapy (72%), but some of them requiredpolytherapy (28%), which conducted to adverse reactions (95%).
Correspondence to:
svetlana.hadjiu@usmf.md