Abstracts

Rationale: The conventional research method to screen for epilepsy is with a written questionnaire administered door-to-door (WQ). Although this enables comprehensive capture of undiagnosed and untreated cases, it is resource intense, insensitive to non-convulsive seizures and inefficient for large-scale case ascertainment. Our aim was to field test a novel digital animation seizure-screening questionnaire that may be more suitable for community-based recruitment.Methods: We developed a series of five high-resolution digital animations depicting visual sequences of young people with seizures (AQ) consisting of: tonic-clonic, simple partial motor, complex partial temporal lobe, absence and myoclonic. Following each scene respondents are asked: Has this ever happened to you in your life? In addition, if respondents affirm to the tonic-clonic seizure, they are also asked about tongue- biting and urinary incontinence. Finally questions regarding prescribed anti-epileptics ever and diagnosed epilepsy ever are asked. We aimed to administer AQ to 500 primary and secondary school students aged 5-18 years. Secondary school students completed AQ face-to-face, in their class groups, with one parent completing AQ via the internet. Only primary school parents completed AQ. Administration to parents was by a specially constructed study website www.sparks.org.au. Families without access to broadband internet (>128 kbs) were offered a DVD version of AQ. Screen positive students underwent epilepsy specialist assessment (ESA) including EEG, to confirm the diagnosis of epilepsy. AQ was repeated on 100 randomly selected students and parents after first completion, to estimate AQ repeatability. In addition, 100 randomly selected screen negative cases underwent blinded ESA to estimate AQ sensitivity and specificity. Results: To date, 49 students have undergone AQ administration with the remaining students anticipated to complete AQ over the next few months. Conclusions: students anticipated to complete AQ over the next few months. Conclusion: If AQ demonstrates similar validity to WQ, it may be a more effective population screening instrument, as it can potentially reach larger numbers of individuals in the community through the internet, DVD and the next generation of mobile phones incorporating video streaming.