Seizure : the journal of the British Epilepsy Association
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Status epilepticus (SE) is an acute and severe illness of the central nervous system, and prolonged SE can lead to brain damage and even death. Ketamine is a noncompetitive antagonist of glutamatergic N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. ⋯ To improve the prognosis of SE, we present a narrative review of ketamine for the treatment of RSE in the extant literature. We draw the conclusion that ketamine appears to be effective and relatively safe for the control of multidrug-resistant RSE in children and adults.
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Multicenter Study
Validation of a phone app for epilepsy diagnosis in India and Nepal.
Untreated epilepsy is a major global public health problem with more than 20 million people not being treated for an easily treatable disease. In part this is due to a lack of trained doctors. There are many more non-medical health workers than doctors and they could have an important role in diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy if they had some tools. We have previously described such a tool to distinguish epileptic episodes from other causes of altered consciousness and here present its validation in three new populations. ⋯ A tool presented as a phone app can be used by non-medical health workers to identify episodes as epileptic or not with good accuracy. It needs to be evaluated more widely but has the potential to play a part in reducing the epilepsy treatment gap.