Prolonged and short epileptiform discharges have an opposite relationship with the sleep–wake cycle in patients with JME: Implications for EEG recording protocols

In a recent study, we found that during 20.55 ± 1.60 h of artifact-free ambulatory EEG recordings, epileptiform discharges (EDs) longer than 2.68 s occurred exclusively in patients with Juvenile Myoclonic Epilepsy (JME) who experienced seizure recurrence within a year after the EEG. Here we expanded this analysis, exploring whether long EDs (>2.68 s), and short ones, were uniformly distributed during the day. Lastly, we evaluated the temporal distribution of seizure relapses. By Friedman test, we demonstrated that hourly frequencies of both short and long EDs were dependent on the hours of day and sleep–wake cycle factors, with an opposite trend. Short EDs were found mostly during the night (with two peaks at 1 AM and 6 AM), and sleep, dropping at the wake onset ( p  < 0.001). Conversely, long EDs surged at the wake onset (0.001), remaining frequent during the whole wake period, when compared to sleep ( p  = 0.002). Of note, this latter pattern mirrored that of seizures, which occurred exclusively during the wake period, and in 9 out of 13 cases at the wake onset. We therefore suggested that short and long EDs could reflect distinct pathophysiological phenomena. Extended wake EEG recordings, possibly including the awakening, could be extremely useful in clinical practice, as well as in further studies, with the ambitious goal of predicting seizure recurrences.