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THE PROGNOSTIC CONSEQUENCES OF FAMILIAL PREDISPOSITION AND SEX IN EPILEPSY
Author(s) -
Pedersen Holger Ejgil,
Krogh Erik
Publication year - 1971
Publication title -
acta neurologica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.967
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1600-0404
pISSN - 0001-6314
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0404.1971.tb07468.x
Subject(s) - epilepsy , medicine , disease , pediatrics , family aggregation , age of onset , genetic predisposition , psychiatry
A material of 193 patients with epilepsy, all of them followed for one year or more, was analysed retrospectively. 84 cases were assessed as symptomatic and 109 cases as cryptogenic. The cryptogenic group comprised 42 cases with and 67 cases without familial predisposition. The females were slightly over‐represented, especially in the cryptogenic familial group. The males were over‐represented in the symptomatic group. The interesting finding in this study was that the cryptogenic familial cases showed a significantly worse prognosis under treatment than did the non‐familial cryptogenic cases. Analysing the cryptogenic familial and non‐familial groups with regard to type of seizures, age at onset of the disease, and the duration of the disease, it could be shown that the prognostic difference between the familial and the non‐familial cases was independent of these factors. When the prognosis in the two sex‐groups was estimated, it was shown that the worse prognosis in the cryptogenic familial group was predominantly localized in the female members. The principal conclusion of this study was, then, that the poorer prognosis in the cryptogenic familial group had to be ascribed to the genetic trait. Further, it was concluded that females not only to a greater extent manifest the centrencephalic epileptic pattern in the EEG, as shown by other authors, but also to a greater extent than males develop epilepsy, and that the epilepsy in the female generally seems to take a more unfavourable course.