Abstracts

Rationale: Non-epileptic events (NEE), as also known as psychogenic, non-epileptic seizures, are a common finding in an epilepsy monitoring unit. In clinical practice, we have noticed that patients with NEE tend to report multiple allergies and medication intolerances, which may be a characteristic of patients with somatoform or conversion disorders. We decided to retrospectively study if an increased number of medication allergies was more common in patients with NEE than patients with epileptic events (EE). Methods: We performed a retrospective review of electronic medical records (EMR) of adult patients undergoing inpatient video EEG (VEEG) monitoring. We reviewed all VEEG reports completed in 2009 (N=361). Of the 361 patients whose VEEG reports were reviewed, only those whose reports documented either NEE (N=78) or EE (N=104) were included in the analysis. The number of medication allergies and intolerances were noted from the EMR. Results: The average number of allergies and medication intolerances for patients with NEE and EE was 1.859 and 0.904 respectively (SD = 3.2 and 1.5, respectively. Analysis with the Wilcoxon non-parametric test showed that patients with NEE report a significantly higher number of allergies and medication intolerances than patients with EE (p = 0.012). Conclusions: The results support the hypothesis that patients with NEE tend to report significantly more allergies and medication intolerances and suggest that this is one factor that may help predict that a patient has NEE versus EE.