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BRE and sleep monitors
Fri, 05/04/2018 - 14:03Topic: Parents & Caregivers
My 10-year-old son has just been diagnosed with Benign Rolandic Epilepsy. The doctor has put him on a low dose of Keppra and Vitamin B6 at night, unmedicated during the day. We never knew he had been having seizures before, but now we realize that his periodic bedwetting episodes may have been seizures (in fact, that's how we found out. He was sleeping with us because he had wet his bed, and ended up having a tonic-clonic seizure).
He's been on medication for about a week. He did have one bed-wetting incident. Could he still be having seizures at night? We were thinking of getting a seizure monitor for him. My husband has found several devices , both under-bed monitors and smart-watch-and-app types. Has anyone had any success with detecting benign rolandic seizures with a monitor, or do they only really work for the clonic-tonic seizures? How would we be able to tell if he's having a BRE seizure?
A lot of monitors are not
Submitted by Amy Jo on Tue, 2018-05-08 - 12:50
A lot of monitors are not useful for seizures with less activity than a TC. Some parents use a baby monitor (not sure when the parents sleep), some seizures cause life threatening reactions (like not breathing) so parents might have monitors which can catch something specific (it's not a common need). Talk to the doc about how medications are started, when increases, and how they are stopped. The general approach is to start very low, maybe increase to the low end of an expected therapeutic level, increase as needed, and wean slowly if needed. So if you still see possible signs of seizures, perhaps the doc is expecting you to call and they'll tell you to adjust up. Finding the right dose is usually a process, a process that's a moving target when a child is growing or seizure activity might change. It's not a one time thing. But I don't think docs explain that. And I don't think docs explain how communication with their office works and what works best.