The pediatric Status Epilepticus Research Group (pSERG) is composed of neurologists and epileptologists at multiple leading hospitals across North America.
WELCOME TO pSERG
The guiding purpose of the group is to delineate strategies for improving the care and eventually the prognosis of children with status epilepticus, especially those who do not respond to first-line treatments and become refractory.
Care of children with refractory convulsive status epilepticus varies at different centers and from child to child within a given center. The goal of the pSERG network is to develop an understanding of causes and response to treatments for status epilepticus needed to design NIH-funded clinical trials to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with status epilepticus.
We established a consortium of reference hospitals that care for children with refractory status epilepticus and use this experience and collaborative research data to develop a cooperative database. This database can then be used to identify clinical variables that should be addressed as part of a future, larger, prospective research study. Possible clinical variables include:
1. Morbidity/mortality and outcome
2. Use of electroencephalography to guide therapy and predict outcome
3. Use of neuroimaging to identify etiology and predict outcome
4. Comparison between different treatment strategies across institutions
5. Biomarkers of long-term outcome for future genetic studies