Abstracts

Rationale: While there are a number of epidemiologic studies on the prevalence and incidence of epilepsy across the world, only a few studies have investigated the clinical characteristics of epilepsy patients in a population-based sample. The purpose of the present study is to describe the clinical characteristics of epilepsy patients from a medical records survey of randomly selected patients in Korea.Methods: Study population was sampled from a nationwide database registered to the Health Insurance Review and Assessment service, which includes all the practicing hospitals and clinics in Korea. Patients were recruited from clinics and hospitals in each cluster allocated by region and referral levels, by a random selection of pre-allocated framework of sampling among the entire list of patients for admission and outpatient visits. Those patients were under antiepileptic drug medication with or without the diagnostic codes of epilepsy or seizure from January 2009 to December 2009. Medical records of the patients were summarized by health record administrators and reviewed by epileptologists. Among the 6,436 selected patients, 2,150 satisfied the diagnostic criteria of epilepsy and were subjected to the survey on the clinical characteristics of epilepsy. Results: The proportion of male patients was higher (1,226; 57.0%) than female patients, and 10.6% of patients were first diagnosed with epilepsy in 2009. 53.6% of patients experienced at least one seizure during the year of 2009. Classification of epilepsy syndrome was possible in more than 90% of patients; 78.1% was classified as localization-related epilepsy, whereas 7.3% was considered as generalized epilepsy. Thirty-five percent of patients did not have an identifiable cause of epilepsy on neuroimaging and thus were classified as idiopathic or cryptogenic cases. The most common cause of symptomatic epilepsy was trauma (10.0%), followed by stroke (9.6%), CNS infection (5.7%), and hippocampal sclerosis (4.9%). There was a significant difference in epilepsy syndrome and etiology among age groups.Conclusions: This research is the first nationwide study on the clinical characteristics of epilepsy in Korea using a national database validated by medical records survey. The etiologies of epilepsy and epilepsy syndrome classification were comparable to those in other developed countries.