



If you’re sleep-deprived, your brain will be more irritated, which can lead to more seizures. The average adult needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night to function at their best, while teenagers 14 to 17 need 8 to 10 hours, and children 6 to 13 need 9 to 11 hours. A poll conducted in 2014 by the National Sleep Foundation found that about 45 percent of Americans say that poor or insufficient sleep interferes with their daily activities at least once a week. Get enough shut-eye. It sounds obvious, but the fact is, most of us just don’t sleep enough.Luke’s Sleep Medicine and Research Center in Chesterfield, Missouri, there are more steps you can take to help you rest easy and wake up refreshed. But according to sleep specialist Shalini Paruthi, MD, the codirector of the St. Making adjustments to your medication, avoiding known seizure triggers, and working closely with your doctor on your treatment strategy are important first steps. Many of the newer seizure medicines are less likely to have these sedative effects, so talk with your doctor about switching if you think your medication is leaving you more tired than usual. Some commonly prescribed treatments, such as clonazepam, phenobarbital, and valproate, can have sedating effects, which means they may make you sleepier than normal. You may even experience sleep disturbances on nights when you don’t experience any seizures.Īnother complicating factor: Seizure medications might be making you extra-tired or even changing the quality of your sleep. Others, such as like juvenile myoclonic and awakening grand mal seizures, happen as you’re waking up. What’s more, some seizures, such as benign Rolandic (benign focal epilepsy of childhood) and frontal lobe seizures, actually occur while you’re asleep. And when your sleep suffers, your brain becomes more vulnerable to these misfirings that cause seizures in the first place. So when your brain is malfunctioning because of your seizures, your sleep suffers. Why the close relationship between sleep and epilepsy? Seizure disorders like epilepsy cause a “misfiring” of activity in your brain, the very organ that regulates your sleep. It’s a vicious cycle, especially for people who don’t realize that their seizures are affecting the amount and quality of their sleep. The reason: Seizures can keep you from getting the quality sleep that you need, which can cause you to have more seizures. Significance: Using a hybrid (algorithm-human) system for reviewing nocturnal video recordings significantly decreased the workload and provided accurate classification of major motor seizures (tonic-clonic, clonic and focal motor seizures).Getting a good night’s sleep is important for everyone, but it’s even more critical if you’re one of the 2.3 million adults in the United States who has epilepsy. However, there was low accuracy in identifying seizure types with more discrete or subtle motor phenomena. The hybrid system correctly identified all tonic-clonic and clonic seizures and 82% of focal motor seizures. There was a fair agreement beyond chance in seizure classification between the hybrid system and the gold standard (agreement coefficient: 0.33 95% CI: 0.20-0.47). The algorithm reduced the duration of epochs to be reviewed to 14% of the total recording time (1874 hours). Results: Forty consecutive patients (24 male median age: 15 years) were analysed. We determined the extent of data reduction by using the algorithm, and we evaluated the accuracy of seizure-classification from the hybrid system compared with the gold standard of LTM. Methods: Consecutive patients with nocturnal motor seizures admitted for video-EEG long-term monitoring (LTM) were prospectively recruited. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy of a semiautomated classification of nocturnal seizures using a hybrid system consisting of an artificial intelligence-based algorithm, which selects epochs with potential clinical relevance to be reviewed by human experts.
