[Epilepsy in childhood: diagnosis and therapy].

Epilepsy in childhood is a very frequent disease. Diagnosis is not easy due to many types of provoked seizures in children. The main diagnostic tool is the medical history. Home video of the paroxysmal event can help the pediatric neurologist, too. The most important laboratory investigation is the EEG but sometime it is not informative. The best provocation of EEG is the sleep deprivation. It is important to register the electrical activity during sleep because in a lot of epileptic syndromes in childhood the pathological abnormalities can be seen only during sleep. The prognosis improved due to the new antiepileptic drugs and the development of epileptic surgery.