This site is intended for healthcare professionals

Sign in
Go to /sign-in page

You can view 5 more pages without signing in

Benign occipital epilepsy

Authoring team

This is usually a benign syndrome of childhood epilepsy.

Children with benign occipital epilepsy have partial seizures characterised by:

  • visual hallucinations
  • migrainous phenomena
  • postictal headache

There is a subgroup of patients who have resistant epilepsy and cognitive impairment. Some of these children have lesions in the occipital cortex.

The EEG shows sharp and slow wave activity which is suppressed by eye opening.

NICE suggest first-line drugs for this condition are carbamazepine, lamotrigine, oxcarbazepine or sodium valproate (1).

Reference

  1. NICE. Epilepsies in children, young people and adults. NICE guideline NG217. Published April 2022, last updated January 2025

Related pages

Create an account to add page annotations

Create a free account

Annotations allow you to add information to this page that would be handy to have on hand during a consultation. E.g. a website or number. This information will always show when you visit this page.