• Sinem Akgül, Nuray Oksüz-Kanbur, and Güzide Turanlı.
• Division of Adolescent Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, Hacettepe University Faculty of Medicine, Ankara, Turkey. sinemhusnu@yahoo.com.
• Turkish J Pediatr. 2013 Sep 1;55(5):552-4.

AbstractThe term déjà vu is used to refer to the feeling of having already witnessed or experienced a current situation, despite the exact circumstances of the prior encounter being unclear. Although the déjà vu experience may be a benign occurrence, it may also be one of the first warning signs of a neurological event such as temporal lobe epilepsy. Symptoms of epilepsy may be difficult to recognize in children and adolescents, as not all seizures involve obvious convulsions. Sometimes symptoms are far more subtle, and these "hidden signs" may appear to fall within the range of normal childhood behavior, or in an adolescent, may be misinterpreted as psychological problems. We describe here an adolescent diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy who experienced persistent déjà vu at a young age. This case presents an interesting finding, as it shows that young adolescents are able to describe in detail an aura such as déjà vu that will allow physicians to identify the disorder much earlier.

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