Abstracts

Rationale: An estimated 50 million people worldwide live with epilepsy. The occurrence of comorbidities poses additional challenges. Psychiatric disorders represent frequent comorbidities. Here we report our experience in the screening and diagnosis of psychiatric disorders in PWE from a resource-limited setting from India.

Methods: 167 adults with confirmed epilepsy were screened for psychopathology using the Neurological Disorders Depression Inventory for Epilepsy (NDDIE), Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7), and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). This was later confirmed by the psychiatrist’s diagnosis. Statistical analysis was done using Stata version 15.1.

Results: The NDDIE demonstrated a test-retest reliability of 0.96 (p=0.0001) and GAD-7 0.82 (p=0.004). The Cronbach’s α for NDDIE and GAD-7 was 0.84 (95% CI: 0.70-0.93; p=0.0001) and for GAD-7 was 0.65 (95% CI: 0.35-0.85; p=0.0001). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis showed an area under the curve of 0.62 (95% CI, 0.51 to 0.73; SE: 0.06; p=0.04) for NDDIE, and 0.62 (95% CI, 0.46 to 0.78; SE=0.08; p=0.12) for GAD-7. Based on Youden’s index and ROC plots, the best cut-off for identifying depression on the NDDIE was >11 and for GAD-7 was >7

Regarding prevalence, mood disorders were identified in one-third of the sample and neurotic disorders in 15%. Our estimates of the prevalence of mood disorders and neurosis in epilepsy match with population-based data from western high income countries.

Conclusions: In light of the high prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities, screening for comorbidities in epilepsy represents an important area of concern. The screening instruments need to be adapted to PWE in low-income countries.

Funding: Please list any funding that was received in support of this abstract.: No funding was received.