Investigation of Behaviour by Dogs Prior to Human Epileptic Seizures and Potential Underlying Mechanisms: EPIDOGS Digital Seizure Diary

This is a international study by Ghent University that will initially involve people from Belgium, Italy and the UK.

Previous studies of alerting dog accuracy are either case studies or retrospective studies that rely on memory recall of information about alerting behaviour, with the risk of memory bias that reduces reliability.

The use of electronic diaries has been described as more accurate and has better compliance than paper ones. Nowadays, electronic diaries offer the possibility of receiving live information and/or timed answers, thereby increasing compliance and decreasing the incidence of memory bias. This would be the first time that "real time" information about dog behaviour and seizures in the same patients is collected systematically. This will facilitate the analysis of the specificity and sensitivity of alerting behaviour as perceived by the owner.

During a three-month period, systematic data on the occurrence of seizures in the patient and on alerting behaviour by the dog will be collected. This information will increase the knowledge of the type of alerting behaviours that the dogs display and will allow to calculate the specificity and sensitivity of dog behaviour interpreted by the owner as predictive of a seizure. Depending on availability of trained and untrained dogs, possible differences in the alerting behaviour between both types of dogs and in their alerting specificity/sensitivity will be studied.To avoid recall bias the information will be received live through a back-end.

To be able to participate, the volunteers will grant the investigators permission, via the informed consent, to contact their neurologist to confirm their epilepsy diagnosis and to send monthly reports of the electronic diary (see below) to their neurologist.