Abstracts

Rationale: to investigate the factors of demographic, epilepsy-related clinical, and psychological variables influencing on the psychosocial functions in pediatric epilepsy. Methods: On a hospital-based and retrospective cross-sectional study, patients were recruited for the evaluations and patients' parents were established scales for their children with epilepsy. Subjects were children and adolescents(n=311) between the ages of 4 and 18 years (boys=171, girls=140), who had been diagnosed for epilepsy. To investigate the psychosocial function in pediatric epilepsy as the dependent variables, intelligence, general adaptive function, emotional/social behavior problem, and quality of life were evaluated. As the independent variables, influencing factors, demographic variables such as age and sex, epilepsy-related clinical variables such as the age of onset, seizure duration, seizure frequency, the number of medication were included. Furthermore for psychological factors, the evaluation of parent's depression, parenting stress, and parenting attitude were included as the parenting environmental factors. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed to determine the influence of each independent variable(demographic, epilepsy-related clinical, and psychological variables) on dependent variables(cognitive/academic and emotional/social competence, general adaptive function, quality of life). Results: Analyses on the effects of epilepsy-related clinical variables and psychological variables on general adaptive function of pediatric epilepsy showed a major difference in competence between cognitive/academic and emotional/social, demonstrating that epilepsy-related clinical variables have comparatively large influence on cognitive/academic competence such as intelligence and school competence, while psychological variables on emotional/social such as social competence and behavior problems. Whereas the results for effect of epilepsy-related clinical variables showed a relatively high influence on general adaptive function compared to psychological variables, the psychological variables as parenting environment showed a relatively high influence on quality of life compared to clinical variables. Based on analyses on the significance of each independent variable, the number of medication and seizure duration within epilepsy-related clinical variables were significant compared to other variables. Furthermore, parenting stress(child variable), expectation/supervision parenting attitude, parenting stress(parent-child relationship), negative and positive parenting attitude showed significant effects on the psychosocial function of pediatric epilepsy. Conclusions: Comprehensive management of children with epilepsy requires entire evaluation and understandings of clinical and psychological related variables for better therapeutic and psychosocial outcomes.