Abstract
We report a case of epilepsy presenting higher brain dysfunction with autistic-like symptoms incipient in adolescence. The patient is a 20-year-old male. He had grown without any problems in his childhood, but has been presenting progressing mental, cognitive and verbal deterioration since 15 years old. These mental and behavioral symptoms were so severe that he was forced to be hospitalized for a long time. On the other hand, he has had generalized tonic-clonic seizures beginning at 8 years of age, followed by frequent absence-like seizures and motor seizures. Most of these seizures disappeared when he reached 15 years old, but instead, mental symptoms as mentioned above had worsened. His electroencephalography showed bilateral frontal spikes and slow waves that often spread diffusely, which was in conjunction with his clinical features, suggestive of frontal lobe epilepsy. Mental symptoms of this case were thought to have emerged because of great influence of continuous epileptic discharge upon higher brain function.
