Abstracts

Rationale: Symptoms of depression and anxiety are common in people with epilepsy. The problem is that patients do not usually complain about their mood. This may be due to multiple factors, including fear of stigmatization, concern about antidepressant medication or about referral to a psychiatrist. The first goal of this study was to compare the prevalence of depression and anxiety in patients with epilepsy and controls. The second goal was to determine whether epilepsy type or duration, and seizure frequency, could influence depressive or anxiety symptoms. Methods: Patients with epilepsy were compared to gender and age-matched control individuals. Patient with difficulties in understanding, reading, and writing or a degree of cognitive impairment, which would prevent them from completing the study questionnaires, were excluded. We used the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) to screen for depression and the Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale (GAD-7) to screen for anxiety. Results: There were 37 patients with epilepsy aged from 18 to 81 years old, mean of 42.2 years, and 21 of them were female. Control subjects aged from 19 to 73 years old, mean age of 48.7 years and 9 of them were female. Thirty patients had focal epilepsy and 7 patients had generalized epilepsy. The duration of epilepsy was 5 years or more in 19 patients and less than 5 years in 18 patients. Seizures were controlled for 6 months or more in 16 (43.2%) patients and occurred every two months or more often in 21 (56.8%) patients. Patients with epilepsy had significantly greater degree of depression than controls (56.8% vs 9.5%, p = 0.005). Similarly, anxiety symptoms were seen more often in patients with epilepsy than controls (35.1% vs 9.5%, p = 0.032). No significant differences were found based on type or duration of epilepsy. Patients with seizures once every two months or more frequently had greater (p = 0.0026) degree of anxiety than patients without seizures for 6 months or more. Seizure frequency did not affect the prevalence of depression (p = 0.187). Conclusions: Both depression and anxiety were significantly more common in patients with epilepsy than in the control group. These patients did not spontaneously complain of mood disorder and would not have been diagnosed without the use of mood disorder screening scales. Patients with more frequent seizures had greater degree of anxiety. In contrast, the symptoms of depression were not affected by seizure frequency. Funding: None.