Study Status: Recruiting
Recruit Status: Recruiting
Study Type: Interventional
Official Title: Epilepsy and Mood Regulation Disorders: a Prospective and Longitudinal Study in Children With Newly Diagnosed Epilepsy
Brief Summary:
Epilepsy is a multifaceted disorder and a major public health problem. In addition to recurrent and unpredictable seizures, abnormalities in psychiatric status, cognition and social-adaptive behaviors are potential major sources of disability in children and adults with epilepsy disorders. Recent studies have unequivocally documented raised psychiatric comorbidities in children with epilepsy, particularly emotional regulation disorders such as depression and anxiety, as compared to both the general population and the children with other medical disorders, neurological and non-neurological. A prevalence of 12% to 35% has been reported, compared to 3-8% in the general population.
Major advances have begun to uncover the potential mediators of emotional regulation disorders and social comorbidities in epilepsy, but important gaps remain in the early detection, treatment and prevention of these disorders. A very small number of investigations have examined children with epilepsy at or near the time of diagnosis. This is a time during which the effects of chronic epilepsy, potential averse social effects of epilepsy, and other complicating aetiological effects are minimized.
Epilepsy syndromes provide a useful framework for considering the risk and type of emotional dysregulation comorbidities. But variability within and across syndromes needs to be taken into account thus requiring a strict phenotyping by specialists in the filed of pediatric epileptology. Retrospective studies, usually including patients with chronic epilepsies and suffering from a mixed spectrum of epilepsy syndromes introduce biases leading to rather disparate findings.
Are such disorders the result of common physiopathological mechanisms, which precede the development of the epilepsy? The link between an un