Is benign rolandic epilepsy genetically determined?

Vadlamudi, Lata; Harvey, A Simon; Connellan, Mary M; Milne, Roger L; Hopper, John L; Scheffer, Ingrid E; Berkovic, Samuel F · Ann Neurol · 2004

case_control · Level III

Where this comes from

Abstract

Benign rolandic epilepsy (BRE) is considered to be a genetically determined idiopathic partial epilepsy. We studied twins with BRE and compared the concordance with a twin sample of idiopathic generalized epilepsy (IGE). All eight BRE pairs (six monozygous [MZ], two dizygous [DZ]) were discordant. MZ pairwise concordance was 0 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0-0.4) for BRE compared with 0.7 (95% CI, 0.5-0.9) for 26 IGE MZ pairs. Our data suggest that conventional genetic influences in BRE are considerably less than for IGE, and other mechanisms need to be explored.

Medical subject headings