The Relationship Between Autism and Epilepsy

My son is being evaluated for a possible seizure disorder. He is having weird night-time episodes that his pediatrician, neuropsychologist and psychiatrist all think could be seizures. He has always had sleep problems, he has night terrors, chronic nightmares, odd night tantrums and other interesting night movements. Since he sleeps some nights in my room, I am able to observe these episodes so I decided to follow-up with a visit to the pediatrician. She ordered an EEG and has referred us to a neurologist (appointment is 7/1).

Our sleep-deprived EEG was this past Monday. We chose to have it done at the Children’s Hospital which is about 45 minutes away as opposed to the closer hospital. I have not had the best experiences with the closest hospital so felt that the drive was worth it. When making the appointment, she asked about his sleep habits. She then suggested that we keep him up all night to ensure that he would fall asleep during the EEG.

Sunday morning came and Alex was excited. Sunday afternoon came and he was still excited and just would not nap. Sunday evening came, yup – excited with no nap. 1:00 am Monday morning came and Alex was negotiating with us to take a nap. Eventually he was up for 30 hours and the EEG started, he did fantastic and didn’t have much of a problem with the scalp scrubbing/electrode placement. He doesn’t particularly like his head messed with but he was so tired he didn’t care. I don’t have the results of the EEG yet but based on what I saw, it doesn’t look like he had any suspicious activity occur.

Reading about the relationship between autism and epilepsy spawned my decision to right on the topic for this week’s Suite101 entry. Autism and Epilepsy looks at a few scientific research studies as well as information from the Epilepsy Foundation. I read several studies and a commonality seems to be that seizure disorders are more common among individuals with the regressive form of autism or those that are more significantly affected, cognitively. I found this quite interesting and although I didn’t understand everything in the studies (I love having PubMed access), what I did understand was eye-opening.

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