Neishay Ayub, MD

“We wanted to see if your SUDEP risk changes over time. If you start in the high-risk group, will you stay in the high-risk group? This is important in terms of what we tell our patients.”

Using the massive SeizureTracker database, Neishay Ayub, MD, and her colleagues sought to identify a way to stratify patients into risk groups and assess the way this risk changes over time.

To do so, they grouped patients with epilepsy into 1 of 3 cohorts based on their risk of sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP). The low-risk group consisted of those with no generalized tonic-clonic seizures in a year, the medium-risk group was made up of those who had 1 to 2 of these seizures in a year, and the high-risk group was defined as those who had 3 or more of these seizures in a year. 

Ultimately, they found that the length of time patients spent within their original group was significantly different between the high- and low-risk groups (

 <.01) as well as between the medium- and low-risk groups (

 <.01). Although, there was no significant difference between the medium- and high-risk groups (

 = .09). To discuss the implications of these findings and what Ayub and her colleagues learned, the Clinical Fellow in Neurophysiology and Epilepsy at Massachusetts General Hospital sat down with 

 while on-site at the American Epilepsy Society’s annual meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Ayub N, Chiang S, Moss R, Goldenholz DM. Longitudinal SUDEP risk stratification with electronic diaries. Poster presented 

 American Epilepsy Society annual meeting; November 30 to December 4, 2018; New Orleans, Louisiana. aesnet.org/meetings_events/annual_meeting_abstracts/view/501567. Accessed January 16, 2019.

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The Clinical Fellow in Neurophysiology and Epilepsy at Massachusetts General Hospital spoke about the implications of this assessment of SUDEP.

Author | Neishay Ayub, MD

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Neishay Ayub, MD: Stratifying SUDEP Risk