Intracranial Sleep Spindles and High-Frequency Oscillations in Children with Focal Epilepsy and Developmental Delay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background/Purpose: Drug-resistant focal epilepsy in children is often accompanied by developmental delay. It is incompletely understood how epileptic activity interferes with normal psychomotor development. We hypothesized that sleep spindles in mesial temporal structures and in the neocortex are reduced in children with focal epilepsy and developmental delay. Methods: Intracranial EEG, recorded with depth electrodes or subdural grid electrodes, was retrospectively analyzed in consecutive pediatric patients (≤12 years) with drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Children with severe developmental delay (group 1) were compared to subjects with mild or no developmental delay (group 2). A representative 30-minute interval of NREM sleep was selected for analysis. Sleep spindles were visually identified in a referential montage. Interictal spikes and ripple oscillations (80–256 Hz) were detected using the Delphos algorithm. Results: Sixteen patients (age: 2–12 years) were included, and intracranial EEG from 740 electrode contacts was analyzed. The median rate of sleep spindles was lower in children with epilepsy and severe developmental delay (group 1, n = 8 patients) than in patients with mild or no developmental delay (group 2, n = 8 patients), although there was considerable variance within the two groups. A reduction of spindles was found both for mesial temporal structures and the neocortex, and both inside the seizure onset zone (SOZ) and in non-SOZ contacts. The proportion of ripples associated with interictal spikes was higher in children with epilepsy and severe developmental delay (group 1) than in patients with mild or no developmental delay (group 2). Patient age and the number of contacts per patient did not differ significantly between the two groups. Conclusion: In children with drug-resistant focal epilepsy, developmental delay was associated with a reduction of mesial temporal and neocortical sleep spindles. This suggests that disruption of local sleep in both regions might contribute to developmental delay. Publication History Article published online: 26 September 2025 © 2025. Thieme. All rights reserved. Georg Thieme Verlag KG Oswald-Hesse-Straße 50, 70469 Stuttgart, Germany
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".