Epilepsies come in many different guises, so they are not always easy to recognise. To complicate matters, events known as ‘non-epileptic seizures’ can easily be mistaken for epileptic seizures. This means that diagnosing epilepsies is often challenging, and patients frequently receive incorrect treatment.
Clear diagnoses will benefit patients
Both winners of the 2022 Epilepsy League Research Recognition Award are working to facilitate better diagnoses. The total prize money for the award is CHF 25,000, which this year will be split between two recipients. Isabelle Beuchat from Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV) is conducting a project entitled ‘Seizure biomarkers after non-epileptic events’, which will investigate routine blood tests and markers that indicate that someone has had an epileptic seizure. It is thought that these markers (lactate and creatine kinase levels) very likely also rise after a ‘non-epileptic’ psychogenic convulsive event.
More detailed knowledge about these biomarkers should help medical professionals to make more accurate diagnoses. ‘This interdisciplinary project has the potential to reduce the number of misdiagnoses and to help identify more useful biomarkers that can then be introduced into routine clinical practice,’ commented Barbara Tettenborn (President of the Epilepsy League).
The title of the second award-winning project – headed up by Pia De Stefano who works at Geneva University Hospitals (HUG) – is ‘Detection and outcome of early nonconvulsive status epilepticus following cardiac arrest’. Comatose patients who have previously gone into cardiac arrest can have ‘silent’, prolonged, non-convulsive epileptic seizures (‘status epilepticus’). Even on intensive care units, only an EEG can accurately detect and enable rapid treatment of such seizures. At present, it is not standard routine to conduct an EEG during the first few hours after cardiac arrest on non-sedated patients who are still comatose. ‘A successful outcome to this study could significantly improve the recovery prospects of such critically ill patients,’ remarked Barbara Tettenborn.
The awards will be presented in Basel on 30 September 2022 at the Congress of the Swiss Federation of Clinical Neuro-Societies (SFCNS).
Epilepsy Research Recognition Award: better diagnoses will lead to improved care
29.09.2022
For the first time ever, the Research Recognition Award from the Swiss League Against Epilepsy has gone to two projects headed up by women. Both are young scientists – one from Lausanne, the other from Geneva. Their projects investigate the use of scientific methods to improve the diagnosis of status epilepticus and of non-epileptic seizures to enable more targeted treatment. The award is worth CHF 25,000 in total.