View clinical trials related to Dissociative Seizures.
Filter by:Some people experience a temporary change in behaviour and consciousness, that often involves a collapse and/or shaking limb movements. These are referred to as 'Dissociative seizures'. Those who experience such seizures have been found to also display high levels of dissociation, which can be described as a change in your conscious experience and may include gaps in your memory for events. It is thought that people who experience dissociative seizures also often have difficulties with their sleep. Having difficulties with sleep may make these seizures and the amount of dissociation an individual experiences worse. Greater dissociation may be additionally linked to worsening dissociative seizures. A psychological treatment for sleep difficulties called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi), has been found to be effective in reducing sleep difficulties. The main questions this study aims to answer are: 1. Does brief CBTi (bCBTi) improve sleep difficulties in those with dissociative seizures? 2. Does bCBTi reduce the frequency of dissociative seizures? 3. Does bCBTi reduce self-reported levels of dissociation in participants? 4. Does improving sleep difficulties lead to improvements in quality of life, mood and anxiety levels? 5. Is bCBTi a feasible intervention to administer in an inpatient setting? This study will investigate whether improving sleep by administering a brief version of CBTi leads to an improvement in levels of dissociation and dissociative seizure frequency. It will also investigate whether brief CBTi is a feasible treatment method for sleep difficulties in an inpatient setting. Participants who have dissociative seizures and sleep difficulties that could be diagnosed as insomnia will be randomly assigned to a baseline phase of 5, 7 or 9 days, where they will fill out daily questionnaires on their sleep, dissociation and number of seizures. They will then begin a 10-day intervention phase where they will attend two sessions of brief CBTi, whilst also completing daily measures. This will allow us to see whether their scores on the sleep and dissociation measures improve when the intervention begins. Participants will be asked to wear an Actiwatch during the night, to gather information on their movement levels during the night. Information on changes in quality of life, mood and anxiety levels following the sleep intervention will also be collected.
Functional seizures are common and harmful. They look like epileptic seizures but are not caused by the excess electrical discharges in the brain that arise in epilepsy. Our understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to functional seizures is limited, and for this reason the development of novel treatments for functional seizures is also limited. Recent research by our and other groups has shown that interoception may play an important role in the development of functional seizures. Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets and integrates information from inside the body. Research has shown that altered interoception is linked to functional seizures. We have shown that patients with functional seizures have a reduced ability to accurately identify signals from within their bodies, such as their heartbeats. The worse their ability, the greater their seizure severity and higher their levels of other unwanted symptoms. In separate research other groups have shown that interoceptive training, that is actively training an individual to better recognise signals from their body, can reduce levels of anxiety and the levels of unwanted symptoms. In this study we therefore plan to explore the feasibility of interoceptive training in patients with functional seizures.
Prospective longitudinal observational registry study of all patients with epilepsy treated in the Mainz Comprehensive Epilepsy and Sleep Medicine Center with the focus on the course of the disease and quality of life.