OBJECTIVE:

To describe the clinical, electroencephalographic, imaging and etiological characteristics of children and adolescents older than one month of life and under 14 years of age with a diagnosis of status epilepticus (SE) attended from January 2005 to December 2015 at San Vicente University Hospital in Medellin, Colombia.

MATERIALS AND METHODS:

Retrospective descriptive study. It included clinical, demographic, imaging and etiology data recorded in the clinical charts from January 2005 to December 2015. Patients under 14 years of age were included except neonates. The IBM SPSS Statistics 2.0 program was used to analyze the data.

RESULTS:

234 patients with 348 episodes of SE were included. The average age at presentation was 3.2 years (± 2.7 SD). The most common clinical presentation was generalized tonic clonic seizure followed by focal motor seizure. The antecedent of epilepsy was found in 50.9 °% of the patients. The main etiologies were fever (60.6 °%), brain malformations (32.6 °%) and the withdrawal of antiepileptic drugs (13 °%). The most frequent imaging findings were hydrocephalus and cortical developmental disorders. The first-line treatments were benzodiazepines followed by phenytoin and phenobarbital. Nine percent required third-line medications. Mortality was 1.2 °%.

CONCLUSION:

The results of our study were similar to those described in other populations. SE was characterized by heterogeneous etiology. It was found that the withdrawal of medications was an important cause of SE in our study.

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