Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Epilepsy Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health Article Date: 04 Feb 2013 - 5:00 PST
Current ratings for: Childhood Epilepsy In UK Has Fallen Sharply
Senior author Ruth Gilbert, a professor in the MRC Centre of Epidemiology for Child Health, Institute of Child Health, at University College London, says in a BBC report of the study:
"We're getting better at diagnosing and deciding who should be treated and then there is also probably an effect of factors like fewer cases of meningitis."
Epilepsy is a tendency to have seizures (sometimes called fits) where sudden bursts of excess electrical activity in the brain temporarily disrupt the normal travel of messages between brain cells.
For their study, Gilbert and colleagues examined records from the Health Improvement Network, which furnishes data on a representative sample of about 5% the UK population.
The data they used in their analysis came from records of more than 344,000 children aged 0 to 14years who had variously been followed from 1994 to 2008.
They found that overall, the number of children diagnosed with epilepsy who were born between 2003 and 2005, was 33% lower than those who were born between 1994 and 1996.
They also found that the annual rate of epilepsy fell by 4% a year between 2001 and 2008, after adjusting for age, gender and deprivation.
When they used a more sensitive indicator for epilepsy, the number of diagnoses fell by 47% and the annual rate fell by 9% per year, for the same periods.
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Childhood Epilepsy In UK Has Fallen Sharply