Improvement of healthcare quality in pediatric neurology by crowd technologies

Abstract

Crowdsourcing and crowdfunding in public health should be considered as an untraditional process of gathering new ideas and assets. Theirefficiency is associated with that a large number of people may be involved in using their specific knowledge to solve complex problems and projects. According to statistics, the annual incidence rate for epilepsy averages 70 per 100,000 population and the disease starts in childhood in nearly half of the cases. So the early differential diagnosis of paroxysmal states in children at the early stage of the disease is a necessary condition for adequate drug therapy. Patients and methods. Only in the period from 2007 to 2009, the Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Epilepsy and Sleep Disorders in Children and Adolescents, Department of Nervous System Diseases, Saint Petersburg State Pediatric Medical University, examined 259 children aged several weeks to 18 years with paroxysmal disorders of consciousness. Among them, there were 156 (60.23%) boys and 103 (39.77%) girls. Results and discussion. Based on the results obtained during the children's comprehensive examinations using video-EEG monitoring, the investigators specified diagnoses in all the examinees and changed treatment in the vast majority of cases. Many nonepileptic paroxysms with external manifestations resemble epileptic seizures; these are rather frequently qualified as erroneous and treated as such. Only the comprehensive examination involving video-EEG monitoring may avoid misdiagnosis in children with different epilepsy types and nonepileptic paroxysms. Video-EEG combines the video monitoring recording of EEG readings and makes it possible to reveal epileptic activity during a seizure, to compare the clinical presentation of the latter with EEG changes, to locate an epileptogenic focus, and to differentiate epileptic seizures from nonepileptic ones. The effective diagnosis of paroxysmal states in childhood is a complex scientific and social problem, the solution of which requires that the government should invest a great deal of assets and may be rational only when crowd technologies are applied.

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