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Etiology of Sudden Cardiac Arrest in Patients with Epilepsy: Experience of Tertiary Referral Hospital in Sapporo City, Japan

Authors :
Hiroyuki Inoue
Keiko Usui
Rei Enatsu
Katsuhiko Tanno
Masahiko Wanibuchi
Shuji Uemura
Eichi Narimatsu
Kunihiko Maekawa
Nobuhiro Mikuni
Masahiro Mizobuchi
Satoko Ochi
Kei Miyata
Source :
Neurologia medico-chirurgica
Publication Year :
2016
Publisher :
Japan Neurosurgical Society, 2016.

Abstract

It has been reported that epilepsy patients had higher risk of sudden death than that of the general population. However, in Japan, there is very little literature on the observational research conducted on sudden fatal events in epilepsy. We performed a single-center, retrospective study on all the out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) patients treated in our emergency department between 2007 and 2013. Among the OHCA patients, we extracted those with a history of epilepsy and then analyzed the characteristics of the fatal events and the background of epilepsy. From 1,823 OHCA patients, a total of 10 cases were enrolled in our study. The median age was 34 years at the time of the incident [9–52 years; interquartile range (IQR), 24–45]. We determined that half of our cases resulted from external causes of death such as drowning and suffocation and the other half were classified as sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). In addition, asphyxia was implicated as the cause in eight cases. Only the two near-drowning patients were immediately resuscitated, but the remaining eight patients died. The median age of first onset of epilepsy was 12 years (0.5–30; IQR, 3–21), and the median disease duration was 25 years (4–38; IQR, 6–32). Patients with active epilepsy accounted for half of our series and they were undergoing poly anti-epileptic drug therapy. The fatal events related to epilepsy tended to occur in the younger adult by external causes. An appropriate therapeutic intervention and a thorough observation were needed for its prevention.

Details

ISSN :
13498029 and 04708105
Volume :
56
Database :
OpenAIRE
Journal :
Neurologia medico-chirurgica
Accession number :
edsair.doi.dedup.....4bee38d34b5ada18eccd1721886c3568
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.2176/nmc.oa.2015-0285