Febrile Convulsions with Epileptiform Waves

LIAO JX¹, XIAO YH¹, ZHANG W²

¹Epilepsy Center, Shenzhen Children's Hospital,

Shenzhen 518026, China

²Shenzhen People's Hospital

Objective: To discuss the relationship between febrile convulsions (FC) and epilepsy (Ep), the significance of electroencephalograms (EEG) to FC, the diagnosis and treatment of FC.

Method: Data retrospectively analyzed about 143 FC patients whose EEG had epileptiform waves.

Results: Of 143 FC patients with epileptiform waves, 97(97/122,79.5%) were six months to two years age when they had their first febrile seizures. 94(94/141,66.7%) were three to seven years age when the epileptiform waves were found out. 51(35.7%) were complex FC, 35 cases of them changed from simple FC. There were 35(24.48%) patients with positive family history of FC or Ep. Patients with positive family history had more seizures than that with negative family history (p=0.004). Seizures “developed to” a febrile were more partial and more intractable to anticonvulsants. The age of first febrile conulsions: the age at which epileptiform waves found out. The number of positive family history of FC or Ep, history of birth asphyxia, mental retardation, epileptiform wave features and the number of seizures were not significantly different between the simple and complex FC patients, and between the febrile and “developed to” a febrile convulsions patients (p>0.05). This suggested that these two kinds of patient sample, with simple FC and complex FC, or with febrile and “developed to” a febrile seizures, were from the same group, only the individual expressivity was different.

Conclusion: FC is a special epilepy syndrome. EEG is very important to diagnosing and determination of the treatment of recurrent FC patients, and should be taken as a important test of FC. When epileptiform wave is found out in a recurrent FC child, it should be considered as important factor in determining whether to treat as epilepsy. The “febrile seizure plus” and “generalized epilepsy with febrile seizure plus” should be introduced to the FC classification, in addition to the simple and complex FC, the parlance “FC develop to Ep” should be reevaluated.

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