Evaluation and Management of Patients with Seizures in the Emergency Department: A One-Year Analysis

ntroduction. Transient loss of consciousness (TLoC) encompasses symptoms caused by either syncope, seizures or psycogenic disorders which are all frequent in the emergency department (ED). The study aims to determine the prevalences of causes of TLoC in the ED, analyse the characteristics of patients with seizures or established epilepsy in particular and estimate the level of evaluation and management they receive in respect to available international guidelines.Materials and methods. The data was cross-sectional and was retrieved from the local database of Vilnius University Hospital Santaros Klinikos from January 1st to December 31st, 2016. Adult patients with diagnoses (coded in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, ICD-10-AM) of syncope (R55), epilepsy (G40) or other and unspecified convulsions (R56.8) assigned either by the emergency medical services or the ED staff were involved in the study (315 cases). The data was analysed with Microsoft Excel v16.0 and IBM SPSS Statistics v20, two-sided Fisher’s exact and Mann-Whitney U tests were employed (p