Sleep deprivation in epileptic patients: an fMRI and EEG study

Sleep deprivation (SD) is considered an activation test to facilitate the appearance of epileptic electroencephalographic abnormalities and support the neurologist in the epilepsy diagnosis. We enrolled 34 patients with a diagnosis of focal epilepsy compared to 15 healthy subjects(HS).The aim of this study was evaluate the cortical activations in patients with SD by using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and electroencephalogram (EEG).In epileptic patients, the results obtained showed an increase of cortical activations in epileptogenic areas detected by EEG while we observed a decrease of cortical activations in the Default Mode Network respect to healthy subjects.