Teaching distinguishing semiological features improves diagnostic accuracy of seizure-like events by emergency physicians.

Background: Misdiagnosis of seizure-like events (SLE) in emergency situations is common. Here, we evaluate whether a single, video-based lesson highlighting distinguishing semiological features can improve the diagnostic accuracy of emergency physicians for epileptic seizures (ES), psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) and syncopes (SY).

Methods: 40 emergency physicians (24 anesthetists, nine surgeons and seven internal medicine specialists by primary specialty) participated in a prospective trial on the diagnostic accuracy of SLE.