Abstracts

Rationale: The National Institutes of Health funded Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) is a reliable, extensively validated and easy to use measures for self-reported health that can be administered in a variety of ways and forms. Although during its development, epilepsy patients were included along with patients with other chronic conditions, PROMIS has not been used in epilepsy since then. We aimed to study the use of a set of PROMIS measures in patients who were admitted to the Henry Ford EMU and were diagnosed with either epilepsy or psychogenic non epileptic (PNES). We report on the preliminary results. Methods: A 46-item, five-domain measure set (PROMIS short forms) was used to assess general physical, social, and mental health (10 questions), pain behavior (7 questions), pain interference (6 questions), sleep disturbances (8 questions), depression (8 questions) and anxiety (7 questions). All EMU patients in the past 2 months were included except for those younger than 18 years old, mentally challenged, or declined participation. The t-scores for all measures except global health are scaled to a mean of 50 and standard deviation of 10. We used a two sample t-test to compare patients with epileptic seizures to patients with PNES. We used chi-square tests for gender and race comparisons between the two groups.Results: We analyzed data on 20 patients (12 females; mean age 46.4 9.9; 88% Caucasian). Fifteen patients had epileptic seizures and 5 had PNES. We found no differences between the two groups with respect to demographics or t-scores on anxiety, depression, pain behavior and interference, sleep disturbance, global physical and mental health. In addition, t-scores in the studied patient population were similar to those obtained from previous Henry Ford PROMIS studies using surgery patients (before surgery); the depression mean t-scores were 55.8 8.7 vs 53.7 8.7, the sleep disturbance 55.9 9.6 vs. 53.2 8.9, global physical health 13.5 3.9 vs. 13.3 3.7 and global mental health 11.4 3.8 vs. 13.5 3.6 (studied group vs. surgery patients, respectively).Conclusions: PROMIS was easy to administer to both epilepsy and PNES patients. Preliminary results on a small sample of EMU patients showed that there were no differences in self -reported outcomes between patients with epileptic and PNES in domains such anxiety, depression, pain, sleep, global and mental health. This finding is in agreement with a previous study from our group (Tojek et al, 2000) that documented that depression and anxiety were only marginally greater in patients with PNES when compared with epilepsy patients. Moreover, there was no difference in measurements of depression, sleep disturbance, global physical and mental health between the studied group and patients who were undergoing surgery. Since PROMIS allows assessment of the impact of chronic conditions on health-related quality of life across diseases, this instrument may provide data on quality of life of epilepsy patients in comparison with those with other chronic conditions.