Abstracts

Rationale: Epilepsy is a chronic condition that affects the patient s overall quality of life. Especially childhood epilepsy affects not only the patient s intelligence, emotion and social development, but also the life quality of their parents. However, there are only a few reports regarding the characteristics of epilepsy which associates with these sentiment behavior changes. In this study, we will discuss the patient s emotional behavior, attention ability, and parental stress according to the characteristics of idiopathic childhood epilepsy. Methods: We performed a retrospective analysis of data from 82 children who visited Asan medical center presenting the diagnosis of pediatric epilepsy. Korean Education Development Institute Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (KEDI-WISC), Social Maturation Score test (SMS), and Comprehensive Attention Test (CAT) were performed on the children, while Parental Stress Test (Parenting Stress Inventory-Short Form (Abidin 1982) and Parenting Sense of Competence Scale (Gibaud-Wallston and Wandersman, 1978) were performed on the parents. Patients with underlying brain lesions or those who has an IQ score under 70 were excluded in this study. Seizure classification, category of EEG (unilateral vs bilateral or generalized epileptic discharges), and numbers of anti-epileptic drugs taken were reviewed. For statistical analysis, the Kruskal-Wallis or Mann-Whitney test were used to analyze the data (p < 0.05). Results: When comparing test scores between the patients according to EEG categorization, the group of patients who had unilateral epileptic discharges (n=17) showed significantly higher scores than those with the bilateral or the generalized epileptic discharges (n=52) in visual selective attention task, sustained attention to response task and Flanker task of the CAT test category. However there were no notable differences in IQ and SMS. In parental stress scores, there were meaningful differences between the three groups of seizures; idiopathic (cryptogenic) partial epilepsy (n=42) /idiopathic generalized epilepsy (n=23) / Benign childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (BCECTS, n=16). Idiopathic (cryptogenic) partial epilepsy group showed especially high parental stress scores in parent-child relationship, learning expectation and anxiety of failure compared to the other groups. Children who were taking 2 or more anti-epileptic drugs (n=9) showed higher parental stress score in learning expectation, and lower social maturation score than those with one AED or none.Conclusions: Childhood epilepsy affects the life quality of the entire family rather than affecting the patient alone. Our data shows that the types of epilepsy, EEG category and the number of anti-epileptic medication certainly affects the social maturation, attention ability of the individual patient and parental stress. Understanding the correlations between these elements as well as managing it, would help offering proper treatment to the patients who are suffering from childhood epilepsy.