Patient's question:
The child has facial and lip twitching and drooling while sleeping at night, but it's fine after a while. The check revealed calcium deficiency, so they need to supplement calcium. Please ask if twitching during sleep in children is due to calcium deficiency or epilepsy?Doctor's answer:
The forms of epilepsy, except for petit mal and bilateral severe myoclonus, can occur in any type of epilepsy. Focal meningeoencephalitis often causes tonic-clonic seizures without warning signs; lesions in the frontal central region commonly cause contralateral motor or sensory focal seizures; temporal lobe lesions lead to psychomotor seizures, while occipital lobe lesions are often associated with visual auras. In most patients, the seizure type remains relatively stable, though a few may experience changes. Early and mid-stage epilepsy may spontaneously remit in about 25% of patients over a period of 2 years or slightly longer, but late-stage epilepsy tends to worsen, potentially evolving from focal seizures to generalized seizures. In severe cases, it may also manifest as memory loss, personality disorders, or intellectual impairment.Recommendations: The diagnosis of epilepsy is generally based on electroencephalography (EEG): EEG is a crucial auxiliary diagnostic tool for epilepsy. With the use of various provocation methods, special electrodes, long-term or video EEG, the positive rate exceeds 80%. It can detect spike-wave complexes, burst rhythms, or other abnormal patterns, which are particularly important for localizing focal epilepsy. However, 1-3% of normal individuals may exhibit epileptic discharges, and a significant number of patients in the interictal period have normal EEG results. Therefore, EEG alone should not be used as the sole basis for diagnosing or excluding epilepsy.