We performed this prospective study to analyse the clinical findings on 457 epileptic children (male 250, female 207) whose seizures were followed up for at least one year among 1,052 patients under 15 years of age seen at the child neurology
clinic of
Kangnam St. Mary's hospital from 1981 to 1990. The mean duration of follow-up investigation was 3.6 years.
@ES The results were as follow :
@EN 1. In the sex distribution, the ratio of males to females was 1.3 : 1.
2. In the age distribution at the onset of first seizure, the proportion of patients below 5 years of age occupied more than a half of all the patients with epilepsy(58.4%), of whom the patients in the group of less than 2 years of age accounted
for
34.5%, and the patients in the group of 3-5 years of age stood at 23.9%.
3. With regard to family history, a positive past history of febrile convulsion was present in 21.9% of patients, and 11.6% of parents and siblings. On the other hand, a positive history of epilepsy was present in 2.6%.
4. The causative factors of epilepsy were identified in 31.9% of the 457 patients in this study. Of these factors, four leading ones in order of frequency were birth asphyxia/trauma (25.7%), congenital abnormalities(19.4%), CNS infection(16.7%)
and
head injury(16.0%).
5. Classification of epilepsy revealed generalized seizures in 37.2%, partial seizures in 52.3%, and mixed seizures in 10.5% of the cases. The most common type of seizure was tonic and/or clonic seizures(26.7%) in generalized seizure and simple
partial
seizures(38.1%) in partial seizure.
6. Abnormal EEG findings were in 77.4% of patients with partial seizure, 43.5% of patients with generalized seizure and 75.0% of patients with mixed seizure.
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