Patients with complex partial seizures may exhibit persistent, high-amplitude heart rate fluctuations during alert waking, potentially indicating diffuse or bilateral mesial temporal damage.
May signal bilateral mesial temporal damage in complex partial seizures; hypothesis-generating for presurgical risk stratification.
Epileptogenic mesial temporal damage may alter interictal autonomic patterning. Analysis of heart rate variability in 19 patients with complex partial seizures revealed cases of persistent, high-amplitude, 4 to 9 per minute fluctuations in heart rate during alert waking. This pattern was most pronounced in poor candidates for anterior temporal lobe resection (2/19). The 4 to 9 per minute heart-rate variability pattern may emerge following diffuse, extratemporal, or bilateral mesial temporal damage, which interferes with descending forebrain influences on cardiovascular regulation.
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Frysinger et al. (1993) studied this question.