Abstracts

Rationale: Patients with epilepsy often have reduced quality of life (QOL) and depressed mood. It is important to know these kinds of background to facilitate the treatment of epilepsy. We sored QOL, anxiety and depression state of the patients with epilepsy for first visit to outpatient clinic for the epilepsy, and examined those characteristics. Methods: We evaluated for the new patients 17 years of age or older who referred to outpatient clinic since February 2014. The patients took the following questionnaire, Quality of Life in Epilepsy Inventory (QOLIE)-31-P, Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS), and Self-rating Depression Scale (SDS) at the clinic. Results: We evaluated 28 patients, 15 men and 13 women. Median age was 25 year old (from 17 to 72). We got 25 valid answer in QOLIE, 28 in MAS, and 27 in SDS. We diagnosed 23 of 28 patients were epilepsy, 11 complex partial seizure, nine generalized seizure and three focal seizure. Three patients started medical treatment after consultation. Overall score of QOLIE-31-P was 60.5 in nine patients with monthly seizure and 72.4 in 12 patients with less seizure than once a month. MAS score showed the patients with monthly seizures had higher anxiety (23.4) than those with less seizure (19.2). SDS sore indicated mild and moderate depressive tendency in each 10 (43.9) and four (52.3) of 22 patients. In remaining eight patients without depressive tendency (35.1), their seizures were well controlled in three, temporal lobe epilepsy in two, and less than once a year in one. The other two patients had generalized seizures arose during sleep. Each questionnaire did not show the differences between seizure types. Three patients suspected to be psychiatric diseases, showed extremely lower QOL (56.8 in QOLIE), high anxiety (25.7 in MAS), and severe depressive tendency (48.7 in SDS). Conclusions: Most patients with epilepsy have depressive tendency. Patients with anxiety and depression tendency increased with the increase of seizure frequency. Compared to the severity and seizure frequency, differentiation diagnosis of psychiatric disease is required in patients with extremely strong deterioration in the QOL or anxiety depressive tendency.