Annotated Bibliographys

Mastrangelo, Mario, et al. "Actual Insights into the Clinical. Management of Febrile Seizures." European Journal of Pediatrics, vol. 173, no. 8, Aug. 2014, pp. 977-982.EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s00431-014-2269-7.

Febrile seizures are commonly seen in infants (and occasionally children as old as five years old) experiencing a fever. Unlike most seizures, these have no lasting negative effects on the child and often times the child only experiences one seizure, and febrile seizures only turn into epilepsy approximately 2-7% of the time. Febrile seizures can be classified as simple or complex. A child that suffers from one seizure only when they are sick with a fever would be diagnosed with simple febrile seizures. These seizures are only observed on one occasion and are less than 10 minutes in length. These have an extremely low mortality rate and are rarely treated by medical professionals as they tend to never appear again. Complex febrile seizures (or simple febrile seizures plus) are those that become more regular after the first occurrence and last more than 10 minutes. Although the mortality rate is still extremely low, these are more often treated because of their reoccurrence. In both cases, hospitalization is rarely necessary as the body generally responds to regulate the seizure before the hospital can do anything else. Typically an EEG is done to follow up in complex seizure cases.

  • “Febrile seizures (FS) are a benign epileptic manifestation of infancy occurring between 3 months and 5 years of age and affecting an estimated 2–5 % of children. They have usually no important negative effects on motor and cognitive development.” (pg. 1)
  • “Febrile seizures (FS) are typically observed during a febrile illness, in children without prior afebrile seizures, in the absence of a central nervous system infection or acute electrolyte imbalance” (pg. 1)
  • “It is probably based on interactions between several factors including individual and familial susceptibility, modulation of immune response, regulation of neuronal excitability, and exogenous agents.” (pg. 5)

This article is published by the European Journal of Pediatrics, a well-known, peer-edited journal. This all contributes to its

credibility as a source.

I am considering doing my capstone project on seizures and seizure prevention. This article gave me a good basis for seizures seen in small children and provided some of the crucial background information I will need to understand future medical journals.

McCue, Lena M., et al. "Prevalence of Non-Febrile Seizures in Children with Idiopathic Autism Spectrum Disorder and Their Unaffected Siblings: A Retrospective Cohort Study." BMC Neurology, vol. 16, 28 Nov. 2016, pp. 1-9. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1186/s12883-016-0764-3.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a disorder commonly characterized by lowered levels of social interactions and communication. Those diagnosed with ASD "commonly experience a high number of co-occuring disorders" (McCue 1). It is known that seizures often accompany ASD. It is also known that when seizures are present in those diagnosed with ASD, there tends to be a lower cognitive level and a higher mortality rate. In this experiment, the rate of non-febrile (not caused by a fever) seizures were measured in children aged 2-18 diagnosed with ASD. These numbers were then compared with the numbers from their siblings who were not diagnosed with ASD. It was determined that children with ASD had 5.27 times higher odds of having non-febrile seizures compared to their unaffected siblings.

  • “Children with idiopathic ASD are significantly more likely to have non-febrile seizures than their unaffected siblings, suggesting that non-febrile seizures may be ASD-specific.” (pg. 1)
  • “Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized not only by the deficits in communication and social interaction but also by the high prevalence of co-occurring medical conditions such as seizures and epilepsy, metabolic abnormalities, gastrointestinal dysfunctions, and sleep disorders” (pg. 2)
  • “These findings suggest that the reported non-febrile seizures may be ASD-specific and cannot be explained by genetic predisposition alone” (pg. 7)

Each of the five contributing authors are known to be college professors who frequently conduct research. In addition this article was published in BMC Neurology, a peer reviewed journal. This article is also published in Galileo, a known credible source.

I will use the information in this article to build my basic understanding of seizures. In addition to discussing how seizures were linked between children in the same family, it also gave a highly in depth overview of seizures and ASD, which will be extremely helpful in my capstone project.

Bakke, K. A., Howlin, P., Retterstøl, L., Kanavin, Ø. J., Heiberg, A., & Nærland, T. (2018). Effect of epilepsy on autism . symptoms in Angelman syndrome. Molecular Autism, 91-8. doi:10.1186/s13229-017-0185-1

Typically autism and epilepsy are found to coexist in children, but this article intended to further determine the extent to which these are correlated. This correlation was measured by using the Social Communication Questionnaire and the number of signed used to communicate in nonverbal children. These benchmarks were compared for 40 children in attempts to compare "the association between age of epilepsy onset, autism symptoms, genetic aberration and communication level." (Bakke 1)

  • "Age at epilepsy onset was highly correlated with SCQ score (r = − 0.61, p = 0.0004)." (Bakke 4)
  • "Mean SCQ score for individuals without epilepsy was 13.6 (SD = 6.7) and with epilepsy 17.0 (SD = 5.6; p = 0.17); 58% used fewer than 20 signs to communicate." (Bakke 5)
  • "The study provides support for the notion that seizures themselves contribute more to autism symptoms than expected from the underlying genetic pathology alone." (Bakke 7)

Each of the five contributing authors are known to be college professors who frequently conduct research. In addition this article was published in Molecular Autism, a peer reviewed journal. This article is also published in Galileo, a known credible source.

I will use the information in this article to build my basic understanding of seizures. In addition to discussing how seizures were linked to autism, it also gave a highly in depth overview of seizures and Angelman syndrome, which will be extremely helpful in my capstone project.