A study on visual evoked responses in childhood epilepsy with occipital paroxysms.

As some apparently idiopatic epilepsies may occasionally pose diagnostic difficulties in regard to their precise status of etiology, evoked potentials, particularly visual evoked potential (VEP), may contribute to the diagnosis of childhood epilepsy with occipital paroxysms (CEOP) as a subsidiary method of evaluation. This study includes 19 children (10 boys 52.6%; 9 girls 47.4%) ranging in age from 5 to 17 years (mean SD = 9.68 3.28) suffering from CEOP and a control group of 30 normal children, matched for chronological age and sex. Peak amplitudes and latencies of the P100 component for pattern-shift VEP (PVEP) and of major positivity for flash VEP (FVEP) are measured, respectively. The results from this study demonstrate that amplitude and latency values in patients with CEOP differs insignificantly when compared with controls. Although, non-significantly, mean values of amplitudes for both PVEP and FVEP were higher in the patients than in the normal children, whereas latencies in FVEP were somewhat longer. There may be some tendency for the amplitudes to increase and the latencies to be delayed in VEPs in patients with CEOP, when an overall interpretation of our and similar studies are considered. In certain cases of diagnostic difficulty, VEP values may provide further information for the clinician, regarding either a symptomatic or an idiopathic nature of the underlying disorder.