Nose Wiping Identifies Origin Of Epilepsy

[Bernard]

Researchers studied 101 patients with difficult-to-treat seizures that are confined to one area of the brain. Patients were admitted to an epilepsy monitoring unit for a presurgical evaluation. While reviewing 440 video-taped seizures of the patients, researchers noticed many individuals frequently wiping their noses after a seizure.

"This simple gesture, nose wiping, accurately identified which side of the brain and location within the brain seizures originated in 97 percent of patients who wiped their noses," said neurologist and study author Christoph Baumgartner, MD, of the University Clinic of Vienna in Vienna, Austria. "Surprisingly, the hand a person uses to wipe his or her nose correlates with the same side of the body a seizure originates."

Simple Gesture -- Nose Wiping -- Identifies Origin Of Epileptic Seizure