LAUSR

In the past 5 years, work focused on seizures in neural antibodyassociated disease has led to dramatic advancements in this field. One such advancement has been the development of predictive scores like the Antibody Prevalence in Epilepsy and Encephalopathy (APE2) score, which help determine which patients with unexplained seizures would benefit from neural antibody testing to diagnose an immune etiology, or “autoimmune epilepsy.”1– 5 Another advancement has been the proposal by the International League Against Epilepsy Autoimmunity and Inflammation Taskforce to replace the term “autoimmune epilepsy” with “acute symptomatic seizures secondary to autoimmune encephalitis” and “autoimmuneassociated epilepsy,” which better reflect whether an enduring predisposition to seizures (i.e., epilepsy) is present.6 In an effort to further advance this field, it has recently been highlighted that a predictive score would be of particular value if it were able to effectively identify neural antibodyassociated disease among patients with seizures who do not have features suspicious for neural antibody positivity, such as broader symptoms of encephalitis.7 A 2021 systematic review of neural antibody frequency in epilepsy used the term “autoimmuneassociated epilepsy without encephalitis” to describe this patient population.8 Although well intentioned, this term has the potential to generate misunderstanding regarding the relationship between autoimmuneassociated epilepsy and encephalitis, as well as the degree of overlap between broader symptoms of encephalitis and other features suspicious for neural antibody positivity, which we aim to clarify herein.