Catherine A Carlson*

Psychological Services Division, Minnesota Judicial Branch, USA

*Corresponding Author: Catherine A Carlson, Psychological Services Division, Minnesota Judicial Branch, USA.

Received: March 20, 2022; Published: April 29, 2022

Abstract

An estimated 15% to 30% of patients referred to epilepsy-monitoring units for drug resistant epilepsy walk away with a diagnosis of psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES). Seizures that do not produce an epileptiform discharge on the ictal video-electroencephalogram (vEEG) will likely garner the ‘rule in’ diagnosis of PNES, or Conversion Disorder in modern nomenclature. The absence of an epileptiform discharge is considered proof that the seizure is not epileptic and thus, it presumably has a psychological origin. For decades, the scalp EEG has been hailed as the ‘gold standard’ for distinguishing PNES from epilepsy and a great deal of empirical data has been amassed on the PNES patient population. Though the PNES diagnostic entity is treated as a proven fact, in truth, it rests on but one hypothesis that might explain a negative scalp EEG. Since not all epileptic seizures produce a scalp EEG correlate, an epileptic seizure is a recognized competing hypothesis for a negative scalp finding. In fact, studies that gather data from both scalp and intracranial EEG recordings show that scalp-negative epileptic seizures are not uncommon, but in modern epilepsy-monitoring units, they are at high risk of being mislabeled PNES. To assess for such diagnostic error we must turn to the empirical evidence which shows that the clinical profiles of PNES and epilepsy patient populations are identical. The similarities are striking and the only data the PNES hypothesis can explain is a negative scalp EEG. Conversely, the competing epileptic hypothesis seamlessly accounts for the bulk of the findings on patients with seizures labeled PNES. The diagnostic terrain is further muddied by the ongoing conflation of conscious feigning with conversion disorder which represents a long-standing conceptual error. The data establishes that the PNES patient population consists primarily of patients with epilepsy, along with a smattering of factitious and likely psychotic disorders, thereby exposing the PNES diagnostic entity as a hypothetical construct that does not exist. Diagnostic theory and practice in epilepsy-monitoring units must be revisited

Keywords: Epilepsy; Psychogenic; Electroencephalogram; Conversion; Functional; Dissociative

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Citation

Citation: Catherine A Carlson. “Psychogenic Nonepileptic Seizures - The Empirical Evidence Weighs in". Acta Scientific Neurology 5.5 (2022): 43-50.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2022 Catherine A Carlson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.