Interictal cardiorespiratory variability in temporal lobe and absence epilepsy in childhood

It is well known that epilepsy has a profound effect on the autonomic nervous system, especially on the autonomic control of heart rate and respiration. This effect has been widely studied during seizure activity, but less attention has been given to interictal (i.e. seizure-free) activity. The studies that have been done on the latter, showed that heart rate and respiration can be affected individually, even without the occurrence of seizures. In this work, the interactions between these two individual physiological mechanisms are analysed during interictal activity in temporal lobe and absence epilepsy in childhood. These interactions are assessed by means of an entropy decomposition that allows to split the information carried by the heart rate, into two main components, one related to respiration and another related to different mechanisms. It is shown that in absence epilepsy the information shared by respiration and heart rate is significantly lower than for normal subjects.