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Sudden death from an epileptic seizure due to capillary telangiectasias in the hippocampus

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Abstract

Cerebral capillary telangiectasia (CCT) is a type of vascular malformation that is incidentally encountered in clinical practice. Diseased vessels are small and usually clinically benign over the course of a patient’s life. Although most CCT patients are asymptomatic, the situation becomes complicated when trauma is encountered. A case of sudden death due to an epileptic episode after very mild head trauma is reported, including a retrospective study of 12 cases, to remind peers to pay close attention to CCT especially when located in important functional regions of the brain. After immunohistochemical staining and pathological examination, we speculated that the epileptogenic mechanism of CCT may be similar to that of hippocampal sclerosis. As the definite epileptogenic mechanism of CCT in the hippocampus is still elusive, we suggest that more research should be conducted on CCT.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0800701), the Foundamental Developmental Reasearch Funds for the Central Universities, HUST(No. 2016JCTD117).

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Correspondence to Feixiang Wang or Yiwu Zhou.

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This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China.

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Written informed consent was obtained from the family members of the patient.

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Liu, Y., Liang, Y., Tong, F. et al. Sudden death from an epileptic seizure due to capillary telangiectasias in the hippocampus. Forensic Sci Med Pathol 15, 243–248 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12024-018-0075-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12024-018-0075-7

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