When patients with epilepsy or “epilepsy” might need a pacemaker

Ictal asystole means cardiac standstill during an epileptic seizure, as in the woman described by Guldiken et al., (2015) in this issue. If the asystole lasts long enough – more than 6 seconds – then a syncope results (Bestawros et al., 2015). This is a situation in which a patient with definite epilepsy might need a cardiac pacemaker, but only after careful thought (Benditt et al., 2015).Much more common is the scenario in which a patient is treated for “epilepsy” but instead has non-epileptic [...]