• Eulàlia Turón-Viñas, Anna López-Casas, Andrea Palacio-Navarro, Antonio Donaire, Gemma García-Fructuoso, Jordi Rumià, Victoria Cusí-Sánchez, and Francesc X Sanmartí.
• Servicio de Neurología, Hospital Sant Joan de Deu, 08950 Esplugues de Llobregat, España. eturon@hsjdbcn.org
• Rev Neurol. 2010 Oct 16;51(8):451-60.

Introduction And AimsThe epilepsy monitoring unit is a space inside a hospital, which objective is to reproduce epileptic seizures in order to better study of an epileptic patient. We have analysed data from all the patients admitted to our pediatric epilepsy unit in the last 5 years.Patients And Methods191 patients have been admitted in our unit, and we have obtained seizures in 186 admissions (monitoring efficacy, 85.9%). In this report we summarize characteristics of these children, type of seizures and treatment.ResultsThe most frequent cause of epilepsy in our series is cortical development malformation. Patients are often late in their admission, with a median time of 3 to 4 years from epileptic onset to admission in the epilepsy unit. After the study, 22 patients underwent functional epilepsy surgery, all of them with excellent results, 9 patients underwent vagal nerve stimulator implantation and in 66 patients their previous pharmacological treatment was modified.ConclusionsThe efficacy of our monitoring unit is similar to previously published, 85.9%. After the admission, we have changed diagnose in 57% of the patients and pharmacological treatment in 29%. We recommend the study in a monitoring epilepsy unit of every patient with refractory epilepsy, meaning an epilepsy that does not respond to 2-3 different appropriate treatments.

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