Synonyms
Complex partial seizures with automatisms; Dreamy states; Limbic seizures; Uncinate fits
Definition
F. Gibbs and W. Lennox proposed the term psychomotor epilepsy in 1937 to describe the electroclinical complex characteristic of seizures marked by cognitive, affective, motor, and autonomic disturbances. In later reports, H. Jasper and Gibbs and their colleagues identified the mesial temporal lobes as the most common sites for seizure activity, recorded via EEG. Others proposed various psychomotor epilepsy subtypes, some of which were associated with extratemporal limbic areas. However, the prominence of the temporal lobe type was emphasized, and the terms psychomotor epilepsy and temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) were at times used interchangeably.
Today, psychomotor epilepsy is an outdated term made obsolete by the 2017 International League Against Epilepsy’s (ILAE) multilevel classification of the epilepsies, which organizes information around seizure types (i.e., focal,...
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References and Readings
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Bell, B.D., Kucukboyaci, N.E. (2018). Psychomotor Epilepsy. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1054
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1054
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