In the category of genuine seizures, the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy may be difficult to distinguish from imitators of epilepsy. These attacks are so variable and so often induce disturbances of behavior and psychic function—rather than overt interruptions or loss of consciousness—that they may be mistaken for temper tantrums in children, drug ingestion, hysteria, panic attacks, or acute psychosis. These seizures may include verbalizations that cannot be remembered, walking aimlessly, repetitive olfactory and gustatory hallucinations, stereotyped hand movements or automatism such as lip smacking. The nature of the patient’s report of a psychic experience is often helpful in distinguishing seizures from psychogenic events. In the former, patients attempt to focus with great effort on the description of the experience, although the term “indescribable” is often included in the report, whereas vague and imprecise descriptions of “something being wrong” or resorting to a friend or family member to describe the event usually implicates a psychogenic seizure. We place emphasis on amnesia for the events of at least part of the seizure as an important criterion for the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. Hysterical fugues can cause substantial difficulty in diagnosis. They may be recognized by the loss of personal identity and by episodes that are longer than typical of seizures, sometimes up to a few days.
Absence attacks may be similarly difficult to distinguish from other brief disorders of consciousness. Helpful maneuvers are to have the patient hyperventilate to evoke an attack or to observe the patient counting aloud for several minutes. Those with frequent absence attacks will pause or skip one or two numbers.
The conditions most likely to simulate an epileptic seizure are psychogenic nonepileptic seizures and other paroxysmal events such as panic attack and syncope but also, unexplained falls (drop attacks), transient ischemic attacks, particularly those associated with limb shaking, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder, subarachnoid hemorrhage, migraine, hypoglycemia, cataplexy, paroxysmal ataxia and choreoathetosis, and transient global amnesia. In emergency departments it is often difficult to differentiate the postictal effects of an unwitnessed seizure from the confusion and amnesia following cerebral concussion.
The clinical differences between a seizure and a syncopal attack are considered in Chap. 17; there it was emphasized that no single criterion stands inviolate. Particularly emphasized because of their potential gravity are episodes of cardiac syncope from a serious arrhythmia, especially ventricular tachycardia. Cardiac arrhythmias may present as episodes of unheralded loss of consciousness, sometimes with associated convulsive movements that simulate epileptic disorders and the failure to pursue the diagnosis of arrhythmia may have important consequences. Palpitations, previous myocardial infarction, ECG abnormalities, valvular disease, and thoracic trauma may direct attention to the proper diagnosis.
Migraine may be mistaken for a seizure. One feature of the focal neurologic disorder of typical migraine is particularly helpful—namely, the pace of the sequence of cerebral malfunction over a period of minutes rather than seconds, as in focal epilepsy. Even this criterion may fail occasionally, especially if both migraine and partial seizures are joined, for example, as expressions of a vascular malformation of the brain.