Abstracts

Rationale: The reflex seizures are evoked by a specific afferent stimulus or a physical activity. Reflex seizures and reflex epilepsies have always been an important model of study for understanding the mechanisms involved in triggering seizures. The aim of this study was to investigate the clinical characteristics of reflex epilepsy. Methods: The study comprised patients with reflex epilepsy who were enrolled among patients who were consecutively registered by K. Heo between 2000 and 2016 in the Yonsei Epilepsy Registry, which contains clinical data for all epilepsy patients. We collected data including clinical features, EEG, and brain MRI as well as outcomes after treatment. The clinical and demographic characteristics were analyzed from the entire group of reflex epilepsy and subgroups. Results: 3118 Korean patients entered Yonsei epilepsy registry, from which 96 patients (3.1%) were diagnosed as having reflex seizures. Age of seizure onset was 23.4 (range 1 to 75) years. There were 64 (67.3%) males and 32 (33.3%) females. Visual stimuli-induced epilepsy was the most frequent (37.5%), followed by epilepsy induced by non-verbal cognitive stimuli and somatosensory stimuli (24.2% & 20.9%, respectively). The epilepsy of patients with reflex seizures was classified to generalized (41.7%) and focal epilepsy (58.3%). Visual stimuli-induced seizures occurred predominantly in patients with generalized and idiopathic epilepsy (77.8% & 69.4%, respectively). Seizures induced by language and auditory stimuli did only in those with focal epilepsy. 74.2% of patients were accompanied by unprovoked seizures, more frequent (91.7%) in epilepsy induced by visual stimuli and less frequent (34.8%) in epilepsy by non-verbal cognitive stimuli. The seizure free-rate (SFR) was 62.8% with an average of 1.96 anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in all patients. While somatosensory stimuli-induced epilepsy showed poor seizure control by 35.7% SFR with an average of 3.22 AEDs, non-verbal cognitive stimuli-induced epilepsy was adequate seizure control by 86.7% SFR with 1.0 AEDs. Conclusions: We demonstrated clinical differences in subgroups of reflex epilepsy, although this data comes from a single tertiary hospital. Funding: No funding