Usefulness of a simple sleep-deprived EEG protocol for epilepsy diagnosis in de novo subjects.

•We assessed retrospectively the role of a simple method of EEG after sleep deprivation (SD-EEG) on a large population of de novo patients evaluated for suspected seizures, bearing a normal basal EEG.•In these patients SD-EEG often reveals interictal abnormalities and bears a high specificity in epilepsy diagnosis.•Interictal abnormalities are different in generalized versus focal epilepsies, and in the latter the interictal abnormalities yield in SD-EEG is higher than in a repeated routine EEG.