Abstracts

Hyperventilation is considered one of the activation procedures that provoke epileptic potentials and clinical seizures. Therefore we evaluated the effectiveness of routine 3 and 5 min. HV in all patients admitted to EMU., Retrospective record review of all patients admitted for long-term video EEG at JFK hospital between October 2001 and Dec. 2004 were included. All patients underwent routine 3 and 5 min HV as part of the evaluation of their clinical spells., A total of 475 patients were included in the evaluation. There were 193 Males and 282 Females, age range between 1-89 yrs. Out of 475 patients, 165 patients did not have a clinical event or EEG abnormalities and 92 had non-epileptic event. In the remaining 218 patients, there were 16 patients with PNES and six of them (18.7) had a clinical event during HV. Similarly 9 out of 43 patients (20.2%) with primary generalized epilepsy had abnormal EEG and 2 of them had clinical seizures in addition to the abnormal EEG. However, out of the 159 patients with partial seizures there is only one patient who had abnormal EEG (focal ED) without a clinical event during HV., This study demonstrates that routine HV generally has very low yield in the EMU. This finding also lends it support to the notion that partial seizures are relatively resistant to the HV activation.,