A comment on hypertension and the risk of poststroke epilepsy after primary intracerebral haemorrhage

We would like to thank Dr. Zelano for his accurate coverage of our recent study (1). Concerning the definition of what is considered an early seizure after intracerebral haemorrhage (ICH), we would like to point out that no recommendation or explicit consensus existed when we began collecting our data (2,3). At that time several different cut-off points for differentiating between early and late seizures were used in the field, the most frequent ones being at 7 and 14 days. We chose the 14-day time frame for early seizures partly to make our results more comparable with those released at the time, e.g., by Bladin et al. and Cervoni et al. (4,5). This heterogeneity in definitions has been a significant problem to date, and we recommend all future studies to follow the recently established guidelines to ameliorate comparability (6).