The role of outpatient ambulatory electroencephalography in the diagnosis and management of adults with epilepsy or nonepileptic attack disorder: a systematic literature review

Electroencephalography (EEG) is an established diagnostic tool with important implications for the clinical management of patients with epilepsy or nonepileptic attack disorder. Different types of long-term EEG recording strategies have been developed over the last decades, including the widespread use of ambulatory electroencephalography (AEEG), which holds great potential in terms of both clinical usefulness and cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic review of the scientific literature on the use of AEEG in the diagnosis of epilepsy and nonepileptic attacks in adult patients. Taken together, our findings confirmed that AEEG is a useful diagnostic tool in patients with equivocal findings on routine EEG studies and influences management decisions in the majority of studies. There is evidence that AEEG is also more likely to capture events than sleep-deprived EEG; however, there are currently insufficient data available to compare the diagnostic utility of modern AEEG technology with inpatient video-telemetry. Further research on the combined use of AEEG and home-video recording is, therefore, warranted.