Autonomic epilepsy--the influence of epileptic discharges on heart rate and rhythm.

Abstract

Epileptic discharges directly influence portions of the central autonomic network, within a brain area too small or too deep to be detected on EEG, most likely deep mesial structures such as the amygdala or portions of the hippocampus. The potential clinical applications of our results include (1) automatic seizure detection, (2) differentiation between seizures of temporal and frontal lobe origin, (3) detection of peri-ictal cardiac arrhythmias, and (4) clarification of SUDS (sudden unexplained death syndrome) in epilepsy.