Frontiers in Pediatrics (Oct 2021)
Case Report: High-Gamma Oscillations on an Ictal Electroencephalogram in a Newborn Patient With Hypoxic–Ischemic Encephalopathy
Abstract
Fast oscillations (FOs) >40 Hz in electroencephalograms (EEGs) are associated with ictogenesis and epileptogenesis in adults and children with epilepsy. However, only a few previous studies showed FOs in neonates. Reported frequencies of such neonatal FOs were in the low-gamma (<60 Hz) band and, therefore, they were not high compared to those in pediatric patients. We herein report a newborn patient with severe hypoxic–ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), who showed pathological FOs with a frequency in the high-gamma band. She was born at a gestational age of 39 weeks 4 days by emergency cesarean section because of non-reassuring fetal status. She had focal motor seizures involving unilateral upper and lower limbs lasting for tens of seconds on days 0, 1, 4, 5, 8, and 9 and subclinical seizures on days 4–11. Phenobarbital (PB) was intravenously administered on days 0, 2, 4, 5, and 6. We found FOs that were superimposed on the ictal delta activities using visual inspection and time–frequency analysis on 8–11 days of age. Among them, we detected high-gamma (71.4–100 Hz) oscillations that appeared to be temporally independent of low-gamma activities in the ictal EEG on 11 days of age. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the earliest reports showing pathological FOs with a frequency of >60 Hz in the high-gamma band in human neonatal seizures, which were previously observed in animal studies. Further studies are needed to elucidate the pathophysiology of ictal FOs in neonatal seizures.
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