This study was designed to assess the incidence of intractable epilepsy(IE), the association between IE and types of epilepsy, and the clinical factors relating to IE in children.
We studied 457 epileptic children whose seizures were followed up for at least one year among 1,052 patients under 15 years of age seen at the child epilepsy clinic of Kangnam St. Mary's Hospital from 1981 to 1990.
The clinical factors examined in the study were sex, birth order, past history of febrile convulsion, age at first seizure, frequency of seizure, duration of seizure, EEG, brain CT, etiology and intellectual development.
IE involved the patients whose frequencies of seizures were not decreased under 50% by appropriate anticonvulsant therpy.
@ES The results were as follows:
1. The incidence of IE was 22.3%.
2. In the different types of epilepsy, the incidences of IE were high in patients with mixed(70.8%), infantile spasm(53.3%) and myoclonic/atonic(44.4%) seizures.
3. The clinical factors relating to IE in children were early age at first seizure, high frequency of seizure, long duration of seizure, abnormal brain CT finding, known etiology and mental retardation.
4. These findings suggested that early effective treatment may be important to prevent evolution into IE.
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