Abstracts

Rationale: Adolescence is a critical period for defining a view of life and taking some times for introspections. It would be a great burden for an adolescent having a disease like epilepsy which is related with low social reputation. We investigated whether the knowledge on epilepsy contributes to mental health such as anxiety/depression and stigma.Methods: This cross sectional study was designed to investigate survey questionnaire for the outpatients, and their caregiver who visited university hospitals. We estimated the patients degree of anxiety and depression with Hospital anxiety depression scale and that of stigma with child stigma scale. Dependent variables were composed of knowledge on epilepsy, epilepsy related factors, demographics, parent's stigma and concealment. Chi-square, Student's t-tests and Pearson correlation test were used for univariate analysis, followed by multivariate linear regression analysis with all clinically important conventional variables and established parameters from univariate analysis. We used SPSS (version 21.0; Armonk, NY: IBM Corp.) for statistical analysis and p-values < 0.05 were considered statistically significant. Results: There were no correlations between patient/caregiver' epilepsy knowledge and patients' anxiety/depression and perceived stigma. Anxiety/depression was related to duration of epilepsy ( =0.30, p-value: 0.038) and idiopathic generalized type of epilepsy (p-value: 0.046). The level of patients' perceived stigma was higher in patients with polytherapy(18.5 7.0 vs 16.6 6.9 in monotherapy, p-value: 0.012) and high concealment score ( =0.62, p-value: 0.0002).Conclusions: Our data did not confirm that patients' and caregivers' knowledge on epilepsy contribute to mental health. Instead, this study suggests that depression/angiety increases in patients with longer duraton of epilepsy and decrases in those with idiopathic generalized epilepsy. Also the level of patients' stigma may be higher in patients with polytherapy and in those who have caregivers with the high level of concealment behaviors.