Abstracts

Rationale: Patients with epilepsy in Mexico are often stigmatized with global cognitive impairment that forbids them to develop in school, work and family matters. Several investigations have found impairment of memory, language, attention, orientation and calculus among partial epilepsy and JME patients. The purpose of this investigation is to learn if there are any differences among siblings, one with epilepsy and the other without epilepsy, in the cognitive fields mentioned and that have been researched in the past, but never among siblings.Methods: 30 patients were included with either partial epilepsy or juvenile myoclonic epilepsy and controls were 30 siblings with no more than 3 years of age of difference and without epilepsy. The 60 subjects completed the CSID scale and were interviewed for epidemiologic data, scholarity and current treatment. Patients had a normal image study, either MRI or CT scan. Only patients on CBZ, PHT, VPA, LTG and LEV were included. Comparison of results were made using Mcnemar test and Chi-square.Results: Couples were equally distributed with no significant diference in age or gender in the groups. Language, memory, orientation, praxis, calculus and attention were evaluated using CSID, which resulted in a P>0.05 in all the evaluations and thus not significant statistitcal differences. When analyzed as two groups with no consideration of familiar relationship, this is, a group of patients and another group of controls, there were no significant differences in neither of the fields of the CSID test, having all p>0.05Conclusions: There were no differences in Language, memory, orientation, praxis, calculus and attention among patients with partial idiopathic epilepsy and juvenile myoclonic epilepsy and their siblings. Divulgation of these findings should be considered in the Mexican population as an effort to diminish stigmatization of the epileptic patient.