zeroing in on specific etiologies, researchers found that patients with generalized epilepsy haver a higher risk of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) than those with focal epilepsy.

Up to 20% of new focal-onset epilepsy in adults may have an autoimmune cause. But narrowing down the population of these patients to those most suitable for costly autoantibody testing has been a diagnostic challenge. And “a nonselective approach to testing epilepsy patients for neural autoantibodies is ill advised,” Jeffrey W. Britton, MD, cautioned during a presentation at the International Epilepsy Congress in Bangkok.

Pathogenic autosomal copy number variations were found in about 11% of epilepsy patients with comorbidities and 12.7% when possibly pathogenic variations were included, in a genetic study of over 1,000 patients in eight European epilepsy centers.