Abstracts

Rationale: Sleep and epilepsy have multiple influences. Sleep complaints are more frequent in epilepsy patients. Epilepsy-related mood disturbances, anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) effects and sleep-related seizures are possible contributing factors. The aim of this project is to evaluate sleepiness and sleep quality in epileptic patients.Methods: In an outpatient epilepsy tertiary centre, a self-filled questionnaire was distributed comprehending general demographic data, the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), the Epsworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) and the Medical Outcome Study (MOS) sleep questionnaires. A clinical report concerning seizure type, seizure frequency and circadian ocurrency, disease duration and number of AED in use was filled by the physician. For comparing demographics and questionnaire scores between populations the Student t-test was used and for the identification of a possible effect of epilepsy-related variables in the obtained test scores an analysis of variance was conducted.Results: In the studied population (n=95, F:M - 56:38, mean age 40.5 ±15.3 years) 30.5% patients had partial seizures, 41.1 % patients had generalised seizures. The mean disease duration of 21.1±15.8 years. 43.2 % patients were on monotherapy and 23.2% on bitherapy. 42.1% of patients were seizure-free in the month before and 26.3% had less than 1 seizure per week. The mean ESS score (8.0 ± 5.0 vs 6.8 ± 4.3) and the mean PSQI score (5.6 ± 3.3 vs 5.1 ± 3.5) were not significantly different between epileptic patients and controls (n=86). On MOS questionnaire, the item of sleep disturbance (32.1 ± 23.9 vs 21.4 ± 22.1, p=0.004) was the only found to be significantly higher in the epileptic population. Epileptic patients had higher scores on the mean Positive Symptom Distress Index on BSI scale (1.79 ± 0.5 vs 1.54 ± 0.4, p=0.002). Seizure type and frequency, its circadian ocurrency, disease duration and the number of AED did not had an affect on ESS, PSQI, MOS and ISP Distress index scores.Conclusions: Globally, epileptic patients were comparable to non-epileptic controls in terms of sleepness and sleep quality as evidenced by ESS, PSQI and MOS tests, with expection of the item sleep disturbance in the latter. The good overall disease control may be a contributive factor for the results. The studied epilepsy-related factors did not show an influence on sleepiness nor on sleep quality. The higher ISP distress index may related to epilepsy chronic course.