Abstracts

Previous research has noted considerable discrepancies between parents[apos] and children[apos]s reports on the nature and degree of the child[apos]s problems on self-report inventories. Children and adolescents tend to overstate the number and severity of their self-reported psychosocial problems relative to parents. In an attempt to determine whether this negative response bias holds true for adolescents with intractable epilepsy, we compared adolescent to parent ratings of health-related quality of life using the QOLIE-AD-48., Twenty-eight (15 males, 13 females) adolescents undergoing continuous video-EEG monitoring for possible epilepsy surgery and their parents or guardians completed the QOLIE-AD-48 during the adolescents[apos] hospitalization. Mean age of the adolescents with epilepsy was 15.5 (2.3) years old. Their mean age of onset of habitual seizures was 8.6 (3.7) years, and mean duration of seizure disorder was 6.9 (3.2) years. The QOLIE-AD-48 was specifically designed to assess the potential negative impact of epilepsy and antiepileptic drugs on the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of epileptic adolescents., In contrast to expectations, adolescents did not rate their quality of life more negatively than their parents. Parents rated their adolescent children as being more negatively impacted than the epileptic children rated themselves across most (7 of the 8) of the QOLIE-AD-48 domains. The more negative parental ratings were statistically significant for Stigma ([italic]p[/italic] = .0002), School Behavior ([italic]p[/italic] =.008), Memory/Concentration ([italic]p[/italic] = .04), and Epilepsy Impact ([italic]p[/italic] = .03)., Results suggest that parents view their children[apos]s seizures as having a greater negative impact on cognition, school adjustment, and interpersonal relations than their adolescent children. This raises the possibility that epileptic adolescents may tend to minimize or deny problems., (Supported by the Medical College of Georgia.)