Leveraging electronic patient diaries in SUDEP risk evaluation

Abstract

Objective: Our aim was to describe the risk factors known to be related to sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) that can be extracted from patients that utilizes an online seizure diary tool (SeizureTracker™).

Method: We conducted a descriptive analysis of SeizureTracker™ users across factors relevant to SUDEP risk. We also compared our app-using cohort to published SUDEP case-control studies.

Results: We report across seven risk factors from 30,813 users of SeizureTracker™ who had a median length of time using the app of 5.69 years (range from 1 month to 15 years). We found that they are at greater risk for SUDEP than groups from published studies (p < .00001) based on the risk factor of generalized tonic-clonic seizures.

Significance: We demonstrated that the population using the SeizureTracker™ tool can be a valuable population for expanding investigation of SUDEP risk factors and is a first step towards establishing a large sample with a method to ascertain data prospectively that might be critical to developing a SUDEP risk algorithm.