Introduction:

epilepsy is the third most common neurological disorder in older adults, after cerebrovascular disease and dementia.

Objectives:

to characterize, older adult patients with epilepsy after an ischaemic stroke, from an epidemiological, clinical and neurophysiological point of view, as well as to relate the topography and the pathogenesis of the ischaemic lesion to the electroencephalogram result.

Methods:

a descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out. The data obtained were analyzed using the SPSS 21.0 statistical package. Descriptive statistical methods were used, specifically the Chi-square test, to determine the correlation between two variables.

Results:

arterial hypertension was present in 58 patients (82.8 %), followed by atrial fibrillation in 38 (54.2 %) and diabetes mellitus in 25 individuals (35.7 %). Acute symptomatic seizures occurred in 30 of them (51.43%). The majority of patients (48.57%, N=34) had frontal lobe epilepsy. No statistically significant imaging or electroencephalographic differences (p˃0.05) were found between epileptic patients, according to the different categories of ischaemic stroke.

Conclusions:

numerous vascular risk factors and presence of acute symptomatic seizures were identified, which represents indirect mechanisms of epilepsy in older adults after an ischaemic stroke. Neither pathogenic mechanism nor topography of each subtype of ischaemic stroke is statistically related to the inter-ictal surface electroencephalogram result.