Abstracts

Rationale: Up to 30% of children with epilepsy who do not have remission of their seizures carry it over to adulthood. However, majority of adult patients do not like to change the doctors in charge of them after their long history of treatment since childhood. There are many problems of carry over to adulthood in children with epilepsy. We evaluated the several problems from the view point of pediatricians in order to establish a possible solution and discussed the work out plan.Methods: We retrospectively studied all the patients with epilepsy who consulted our out-patient clinic from April to June (3 months) in 2014 utilizing the medical charts.Results: The total number of patients was 666. The number of patients aged over 20 years old, whose seizures started in childhood, was 234 (35.1%). Representative problems were the following: going to a higher school, getting a job, marriage, pregnancy, childbirth and obtaining a driver’s license. As pediatric epilepsy experts saw many carry-over patients and took time to solve the above problems, it caused a decline in consultation hours.Conclusions: Work out plans are conventional treatments followed up by general practitioners and a once a year basis periodic medical examination by specialists to share the role and build a system for introducing intractable patients who need an operation at their early stage. Follow up consultations with carry-over patients will be better if there is cooperation with neurologists, neurosurgeons and psychiatrists.