Wesley T Kerr, Emily A Janio, Chelsea T Braesch, Justine M Le, Jessica M Hori, Akash B Patel, Norma L Gallardo, Janar Bauirjan, Shannon R D'Ambrosio, Andrea M Chau, Eric S Hwang, Emily C Davis, Albert Buchard, David Torres-Barba, Mona Al Banna, Sarah E Barritt, Andrew Y Cho, Jerome Engel, Mark S Cohen, John M Stern
OBJECTIVE: Low-cost evidence-based tools are needed to facilitate the early identification of patients with possible psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES). Prior to accurate diagnosis, patients with PNES do not receive interventions that address the cause of their seizures and therefore incur high medical costs and disability due to an uncontrolled seizure disorder. Both seizures and comorbidities may contribute to this high cost. METHODS: Based on data from 1,365 adult patients with video-electroencephalography-confirmed diagnoses from a single center, we used logistic and Poisson regression to compare the total number of comorbidities, number of medications, and presence of specific comorbidities in five mutually exclusive groups of diagnoses: epileptic seizures (ES) only, PNES only, mixed PNES and ES, physiologic nonepileptic seizurelike events, and inconclusive monitoring...
November 2017: Epilepsia