We report a girl with Panayiotopoulos syndrome (PS) associated with sporadic hemiplegic migraine (SHM). A 4-year-and-1month old girl with normal development and lack of any family history of neurologic diseases including epilepsy and migraine experienced severe headache, nausea, vomiting and transient left hemiplegia. Similar attacks recurred three times during the subsequent 8 months. Her second attack shared the same symptoms with the first one, which was compatible with SHM. While headache and vomiting were the only manifestations in the third attack, consciousness disturbance with tonic eyes deviation to the left for 20 minutes, followed by vomiting and headache, were observed in the latest episode, all of which were consistent with PS. The interictal EEGs taken after the 4th attack demonstrated repetitive spikes with the right occipital predominance. The ictal manifestations and the EEG findings confirmed her diagnosis as PS.
Previous studies have shown that HM and some idiopathic epilepsies share the mutations of neuronal ion channel genes, implicating that both are the similar channelopathy. Our case suggests that the same neurofunctional abnormality may be responsible for both SHM and PS.
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