Alcohol Consumption and Withdrawal in New-Onset Seizures

To the Editor: Ng et al. interpret the data from their study¹ of alcohol consumption and withdrawal in patients admitted to the hospital for workup of a first seizure so as to discredit the commonly accepted concept of alcohol withdrawal seizures. Before abandoning this clinically useful concept, readers should know of two reasons why the phenomenon of alcohol withdrawal seizures may well be a real one and yet have gone undetected in this study. First, as the authors are aware, “First seizures in the hospital are a select subsample of first seizures in the community.”¹ Since the clinical entity of.