Explore the relationship between prolonged febrile convulsions, temporal lobe epilepsy and hippocampal sclerosis; The hypothesis that prolonged febrile convulsions cause hippocampal injury that evolves to sclerosis and then to temporal lobe epilepsy has been promulgated for decades since the advent of surgical treatment of temporal lobe epilepsy. However, this concept has never been addressed with a prospective clinical study. With the availability of magnetic resonance imaging techniques capable of discerning hippocampal edema and measuring hippocampal volume, patients suffering from these seizures can now be studied acutely and chronically to determine if hippocampal injury does occur during them and under what clinical circumstances. We are conducting a longterm study of this phenomenon in cooperation with 5 other medical centers which will prospectively enroll 200 infants presenting with febrile status epilepticus and follow these infants for 10 - 15 years with sequential neuroimaging, electroencephalographic and developmental testing to determine the long term consequences of these infantile seizures.
