[Ictal syncopes. Cardiac sympathetic innervation disorder as the etiology?]

We report 3 cases of an ictal sinus arrest. All patients suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Seizures were monitored with simultaneous video-eeg during preoperative epilepsy diagnosis. One patient with cortical dysplasia, who frequently suffered from long lasting syncopes, had a nearly completely missing cardiac sympathetic innervation in MIBG-SPECT (=Meta-Iodide-Benzyle-Guanidine-single-photon-emission tomography). Cardiac investigation including long-term ECG and echocardiography had shown normal findings. After epilepsy surgery the syncopal events in all patients disappeared. A dominant parasympathetic ictal stimulus following excitation of the reticular formation might cause the ictal bradycardia and sinus arrest. A missing sympathetic innervation, possibly occurring as fehlbildung together with cortical dysplasia, which makes autoregulation impossible, might then be the explanation for sudden cardiac ictal death.