Video Game-Induced Theta Rhythm

Smartphones and other personal electronic devices present novel cortical processing tasks with potential for identification of novel EEG waveforms. A 17-year-old patient with epilepsy manifested as recurrent myoclonic seizures, absence seizures, and a single generalized tonic-clonic seizure was hospitalized to undergo video-EEG monitoring for seizure quantification and classification of the epilepsy syndrome. During the monitoring session, a frontocentral predominant 5 to 6 Hz theta rhythmwas identified only when the patient was actively texting or playing a video game on his smartphone. Previously, patients with focal epilepsy have been found to have a frontocentral theta rhythm on EEG while texting on mobile devices. We report similar EEG findings in a patient with genetic generalized epilepsy during smartphone gaming to expand the population and triggers for this theta waveform. Given the young age and type of epilepsy, we suggest that the waveform represents the EEG manifestation of the attention-visuomotor pathway that is stimulus independent.