• J Praline, B de Toffol, K Mondon, C Hommet, C Prunier, P Corcia, B Lucas, and A Autret.
• Service de neurologie et de neurophysiologie clinique, hôpital Bretonneau, CHU, 2, boulevard Tonnelé, 37044 Tours cedex, France. julien.praline@wanadoo.fr <julien.praline@wanadoo.fr>
• Neurophysiol Clin. 2004 Oct 1; 34 (3-4): 175-81.

PurposeThe indications of emergency electroencephalogram (eEEG) were defined by a French consensus conference in May 1996. We retrospectively confronted the recommendations with the actual requests for emergency EEG in our University hospital, in order to determine the contribution of the eEEG in the most frequent clinical situations encountered.Material And MethodThree hundred and twenty nine consecutive eEEGs over a 6-months period were retrospectively analyzed.Results And ConclusionThe most frequent indications were presumption of brain death (13%), convulsive status epilepticus after treatment (12.1%), and suspicion of nonconvulsive epilepticus status (10.6%). More than one third of the requests (38.6%) were not in conformity with the recommendations of the consensus conference. The contribution of the EEG is much improved by the application of the consensual criteria. Thus, the EEG remains essential for the management of convulsive status epilepticus after treatment, to seek a subtle epilepticus status or a nonconvulsive epilepticus status. Conversely, the EEG did not prove useful in emergency after a transient loss or alteration of consciousness or a focal, non-febrile, neurological transient or permanent deficit.

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