[Laughing in complex partial seizure epilepsy. A video tape analysis of 32 patients with laughing as symptom of an attack (author's transl)]

Abstract

According to videotape analysis, laughter is a frequent (42.7%) symptom during psychomotor attacks. The results of our investigations show that it is no longer possible to regard it as a "curiosity", as did Janz (1969). It is an epileptic phenomenon like others and a symptom of automatism. It can occur in all phases of an attack. It is not remembered by the patient. We have been unable to establish any connection with age or sex. The form of expression is usually natural but inadequate and no affective motivation has been established. Laughter during an epileptic attack is an inborn emotional expression, structurally triggered by the involvement of the area around the hypothalamus-thalamic nucleus with the process causing the epilepsy. It is not actively experienced and is therefore not conscious and not an expression of the pleasant side of the affective complex moderated by the limbic system. The EEG's showed the usual variations occurring in psychomotor epilepsy. The temporal lobes are particularly involved. There is no "EEG Laughter Pattern". The group of patients considered here consist of severe, therapy-resistent cases of partial seizure epilepsy with pronounced cerebral lesions. In order to determine whether laughter is so common in less severe cases, a comparison group must be investigated. Laughter as a symptom of an epileptic attack is unknown to doctors and nursing staff and thus is either not recorded at all or, only very seldom. "Gelastic epilepsy" so-called does not exist as a nosology entity. This term should thus only be used--if at all--in cases where the laughter, together with a change in the level of consciousness, has over a period of years constantly been the only symptom of an attack, expecially when these attacks first became manifest in earliest childhood and are due to connatal changes in the hypothalamus-thalamic region.