About

Nicholas S. Abend, MD, is a Professor of Neurology at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He serves as Medical Director of Clinical Neurophysiology at the same institution and is an Associate Scholar at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, specifically within the Epidemiology Unit of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. Dr. Abend also holds the position of Director of Strategy and Inpatient Operations in the Division of Neurology and is a Senior Medical Director for Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a core faculty member at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, involved in the Clinical Futures Center of Excellence and the Center for Pediatric Clinical Effectiveness. Additionally, he holds the distinguished endowed chair in the Department of Pediatrics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Pediatrics
• Internal medicine
• Psychiatry
• Anesthesia
• Philosophy
• Endocrinology
• Psychology
• Multimedia
• Emergency medicine
• Linguistics
• Family medicine
• Intensive care medicine

Selected publications

• AES ILAE North America Symposium: Guiding Evidence-Based Epilepsy Management

  Epiliepsy currents/Epilepsy currents · 2026-02-27

  articleOpen access

  Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) provide evidence-based recommendations to optimize patient care. Their development should be rigorous and include defining the scope, conducting systematic reviews, evaluating the quality of the evidence and formulating recommendations that are linked to the evidence. When peer reviewed evidence is insufficient to inform CPGs, consensus-based recommendations (CBR) are an alternative. Both CPG and CBR are essential to inform best practices and inform health policy. This review highlights recent epilepsy CPG and CBR about genetic testing, neonatal seizures, pediatric depression, epilepsy surgery referral timing and addresses their impact on outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Screening for Anxiety Symptoms With the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 Versus Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 in Children With Headache or Epilepsy

  Pediatric Neurology · 2026-02-04 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Medication Barriers in Pediatric Patients With Epilepsy

  Pediatric Neurology · 2026-01-30 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Quality Improvement Initiative to Implement Anxiety Screening for Children and Teens With Headache and Epilepsy

  Neurology Clinical Practice · 2025-03-31 · 3 citations

  article

  Background and Objectives: We conducted a quality improvement initiative to implement standardized screening for anxiety among adolescents with headache and/or epilepsy receiving outpatient neurology care at a quaternary health care system, consistent with recommendations from the American Academy of Neurology. Our SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Based) aim was to screen ≥90% of established patients aged 12 years or older seen by a participating health care professional using a standardized anxiety screener by February 2024. Methods: This initiative was conducted in patients seen for follow-up by 17 participating neurology health care professionals. Health care professional opinions were assessed before and after implementation of the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), administered as a previsit questionnaire distributed using the electronic health record. The integrated workflow included a best practice advisory (BPA) alert that permitted easy access to interventions and automatic population of education materials into the after-visit summary. After 12 months of use (March 2023 to February 2024), we assessed demographic and diagnostic information, GAD-7 completion rates, anxiety symptom severity, BPA utilization, and health care professional acceptance of the intervention. Results: The GAD-7 was completed for 64% of 3,671 encounters and by 71% of 2031 unique patients. The GAD-7 was more often completed for encounters if the patient was female, younger, or White or had a headache diagnosis. Among unique patients, anxiety symptoms were minimal in 50%, mild in 24%, moderate in 17%, and severe in 10%. Severe anxiety symptoms were more often present in female patients or those with a headache diagnosis. Among patients with severe anxiety symptoms, 66% had established behavioral health care plans and, for remaining patients, referrals were made to community behavioral health care professionals (11%), or pediatric psychologists (4%) or social workers (3%) within neurology. Clinicians indicated that the approach was easy to use and improved the quality of patient care. Discussion: We implemented standardized EHR-based screening for anxiety symptoms for pediatric neurology patients, most of whom had headache or epilepsy. Screening was feasible, and approximately one-quarter of patients had moderate or severe anxiety symptoms. Future work will focus on improving completion rates of previsit questionnaires including the GAD-7 and optimizing clinician actions based on the screening data.

  PublisherDOI

• Retrospective, Multicenter Study of Lacosamide to Treat Neonatal Seizures

  Annals of the Child Neurology Society · 2025-12-19

  articleOpen access

  ABSTRACT Objective Most antiseizure medications (ASMs) are prescribed off label for neonates. Lacosamide's efficacy in infants and availability in intravenous formulation suggest potential utility for neonates. We evaluated the safety and efficacy of lacosamide for neonatal seizures. Methods This 10‐center, retrospective study of neonates with seizures and lacosamide treatment initiated by ≤ 48 weeks postmenstrual age collected clinical data from medical records and electroencephalogram recordings. Lacosamide efficacy was determined by changes in seizure burden with lacosamide treatment and seizure cessation by hospital discharge. Potential adverse events were reviewed. Results Among 62 eligible neonates, 33 had acute provoked seizures while 29 had neonatal‐onset epilepsy; there was no difference in seizure type or baseline seizure severity between groups. There were high rates of pretreatment status epilepticus (48%) and treatment‐resistant seizures, with 93% receiving ≥ 3 ASMs before lacosamide. Most received intravenous lacosamide, with a median loading dose of 5.0 mg/kg and median daily dose of 7.3 mg/kg. Seizure cessation occurred in 37% of neonates; 21% had no additional ASM administered after lacosamide. Seizure burden, measured in seizure minutes per hour, was lower at both 4 h and 7 days following lacosamide administration. In addition, there was a median reduction in seizure frequency of 30 seizures per day at 7 and 30 days posttreatment ( p < .05). Lacosamide was continued at discharge in most neonates (72%). Seventy adverse events were reported in 35 (56%) neonates. Four transient events with possible or unknown relationship to lacosamide were likely multifactorial in origin; none were cardiac arrhythmias. Summary Despite high rates of treatment‐resistant seizures in this neonatal cohort, 37% experienced seizure cessation and most remained on lacosamide at hospital discharge. Most adverse events were not attributed to lacosamide. These results favor use of lacosamide and provide a rationale for future prospective studies.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Medical & Socioeconomic Risk Factors Associated with Lack of Neurodevelopmental Evaluation Following Neonatal Cardiac Surgery

  Pediatric Cardiology · 2025-01-04 · 1 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Contributors

  Elsevier eBooks · 2025-06-02

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Validation of a New AI Seizure Detection Algorithm for Pre-term Neonates, Term Neonates and Infants

  medRxiv · 2025-11-02 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Seizures are frequent in the first year of life and they are associated with increased risk of long-term neurological disability. Accurate diagnosis of seizures in neonates and infants requires continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring with expert interpretation. While rapid detection of seizures allows timely management and may influence neurodevelopmental outcomes, it may not be feasible in settings without round-the-clock expert interpretation. We evaluated the real-world performance of Clarity (Ceribell Inc.), a novel algorithm for automated seizure detection from EEG of preterm neonates, term neonates, and infants in a validation dataset of patients of postnatal age 0-1 years and gestational age 22-42 weeks who underwent continuous EEG monitoring at three hospitals in the United States. We quantified algorithm performance using the following metrics: (1) area under the curve for classification of 10-second EEG segments as seizure or no seizure; (2) sensitivity and false positives in detecting seizure episodes; and (3) sensitivity, specificity and negative/positive predictive value in identifying recordings where seizure duration reached or exceeded predetermined thresholds. The validation dataset consisted of 756 EEG recordings with a cumulative duration of 5230 hours (median: 2.94 hours, interquartile interval: 1.46-12.62 hours) from 167 preterm neonates, 323 term neonates, and 266 infants. A total of 568 seizures occurred in 75 recordings, with a cumulative seizure duration of 15.13 hours. The algorithm achieved an area under the curve of 0.96. The algorithm was correct 99-100% of the time when ruling out seizures in a recording. It correctly detected 75-83% of seizure episodes and identified 89-94% of recordings containing seizures. Performance was equivalent between preterm neonates, term neonates, and infants and across the three participating hospitals. Overall, the Clarity algorithm demonstrated high performance in detecting and ruling out seizures from EEG data in preterm neonates, term neonates, and infants across three hospitals. This demonstrates real-world feasibility and high reliability of automatic seizure detection with Clarity for continuous EEG monitoring in the first year of life.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Use of Continuous EEG Monitoring and Short-term Outcomes in Critically Ill Children

  Journal of Pediatric Intensive Care · 2025-07-22

  articleOpen access

  Objectives: This study aimed to compare short-term outcomes at pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) discharge in critically ill children with and without continuous EEG (cEEG) monitoring. Methods: We retrospectively compared 234 patients who underwent cEEG with 2294 patients without cEEG. Propensity score matching was used to compare patients with seizures and status epilepticus between cEEG cohort and historical cohort. Results: The EEG cohort had higher in-hospital mortality, worse Pediatric Cerebral Performance Category (PCPC) scores, and greater PCPC decline at discharge. In patients with status epilepticus, PCPC decline was higher in the cEEG cohort. Conclusions: PCPC decline at PICU discharge was associated with cEEG monitoring in patients with status epilepticus.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Treating seizures faster: The Quality Improvement in Time to Treat Status Epilepticus (QuITT-SE) multicenter randomized stepped wedge clinical trial protocol

  Contemporary Clinical Trials · 2025-02-08 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant K02NS096058

  NIH · $579k · 2022

• NIH Grant K23NS076550

  NIH · $877k · 2017

Frequent coauthors

• Iván Sánchez Fernández

  Boston University

  822 shared

• Tobias Loddenkemper

  Harvard University

  645 shared

• Katrina Peariso

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  622 shared

• Shavonne L. Massey

  Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

  607 shared

• Kevin Chapman

  Phoenix Children's Hospital

  559 shared

• Jessica L. Carpenter

  University of Maryland, Baltimore

  555 shared

• Courtney J. Wusthoff

  Stanford University

  509 shared

• Mohamad A. Mikati

  Duke University Hospital

  507 shared

Labs

• Nicholas S. Abend LaboratoryPI

Education

• B.S.

  Washington University

  1998

• M.D.

  University of Chicago School of Medicine

  2002

• Other

  University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

  2015

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Endowed Chair in the Department of Pediatrics,…