Cognitive Correlates of Abnormal EEG Waveforms in Children

  • J. Martinius
Conference paper

Abstract

Cognitive processes are central to mental and psychic development and well-being in childhood, in particular during school age. Prerequisites for cognition and, in a broader sense, for learning are composite brain functions, which in children who suffer from brain dysfunction are disturbed in one way or another. Abnormal EEG waveforms are one of the many functional expressions of brain pathology. If they occur in the surface EEG with a particular configuration, distribution, and time course, such waveforms may be the correlate of epilepsy or, in the absence of overt clinical signs of seizures, an indication of an increased tendency to have epileptic seizures. In children with proven epilepsy and in some without manifest seizures, abnormal waveforms of the hypersynchronous type do occur, although paroxysmally and frequently at times of apparently intact consciousness. This observation has aroused interest in its significance and stimulated research studying and analyzing in detail cognitive functioning in relation to the “interictal” occurrence of abnormal waveforms in the EEG.

Keywords

Burst Activity Epileptiform Activity Epileptic Child Cognitive Correlate Ambulatory Recording 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1990

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  • J. Martinius

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