Beta waves monitoring for the prognosis of seizures in epileptic pediatric patients

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that causes abnormal recurrent seizures with sudden bursts of the brain’s electrical activity. Loss of consciousness, injury, or memory impairment are possibly such seizure’s serious consequences. Therefore, predicting seizures before they occur can help patients improve their quality of life. One possible way to predict seizures is to monitor the patient’s brain waves using electroencephalography (EEG), recording the brain’s electrical signals. Studies have suggested that before or during a seizure, brain waves, such as beta waves, may change in frequency or amplitude. Here I show that in pediatric patients with epilepsy, beta waves increase significantly before and during seizures compared to their baseline levels. I analyzed the EEG recordings of 35 seizure sets. I measured the beta wave power during the 30-second interval before and during the seizure. I found that the beta wave power increased by an average of more than 400% in the 30-second interval before the seizure onset, compared to the baseline. My results indicate that beta waves can be a reliable source of truth for pediatric patients’ epilepsy seizure prediction and suggest that beta waves may play a pivotal role in the seizures’ neural processes. This study contributes to the field of seizure prediction, a challenging yet important task for epilepsy research. The simple, non-invasive method of EEG analysis can be an extremely useful tool for such prediction for pediatric patients with epilepsy. My findings also warrant further investigation to understand the seizure generation and propagation mechanisms in the brain.