The risk of epilepsy after neonatal seizures.

The study relied on registry-based diagnoses, which may have missed electrographic-only seizures or misclassified clinical events, potentially underestimating the true number of neonatal seizures. The definition of epilepsy required two separate diagnoses, which might exclude some cases of single-provoked seizures with high recurrence risk. The study could not disentangle the effect of the underlying pathology causing the seizures from the seizures themselves. There was no confirmation that diagnoses strictly followed ILAE criteria, and a false discovery rate of 29% was reported in similar validation studies.

The authors stated they had no interests which might be perceived as posing a conflict or bias.

Do not assume that every child with neonatal seizures will develop epilepsy. Four out of five neonatal survivors with a history of neonatal seizures did not develop epilepsy, so the increased risk should not be interpreted as a certainty of outcome.