Objective: Patients with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) may present with convulsive events that are not accompanied by epileptiform brain activity. Video-electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring is the gold standard for diagnosis, yet not all patients experience convulsive episodes during video-EEG sessions. Hence, we aimed to construct a predictive model in order to detect PNES from serum hormone levels, detached from an evaluation of patients' convulsive episodes.
Methods: Fifteen female patients with PNES and 60 healthy female controls participated in the study, providing blood samples for hormone analysis. A binomial logistic regression model and the leave-one-out cross-validation were employed.
Results: We found that levels of neuropeptide Y and adrenocorticotropic hormone were the optimal combination of predictors, with over 90% accuracy (area under the curve=0.980).
Conclusions: The ability to diagnose PNES irrespective of convulsive events would represent an important step considering its feasibility and affordability in daily clinical practice.
Keywords: adrenocorticotropic hormone; diagnosis; neuropeptide Y; seizures; serum.