IU School of Nursing Bloomington Associate Dean Wendy Trueblood Miller, as part of an international team of researchers from IU, Binghamton University, and Portgual’s Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, explored the potential of using social media to detect behaviors that could precede sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP), the leading cause of death in people with uncontrolled epileptic seizures.
Their findings, recently published in the journal "Epilepsy & Behavior", reveal that the activity of epilepsy patients in social media increased before their sudden deaths. These changes in digital behavior could be used as early warning signals to put preventive interventions for SUDEP into practice.