Etiological factors, frequency, diagnosis and therapy of epilepsy in children with cerebral palsy

Abstract

Epilepsy is common in children with cerebral palsy (CP) as out of 521 patients with CP 58% (n = 303) have epilepsy. Epilepsy is most frequent in patients with spastic quadriparesis (n=112, 37.0%), followed by children with spastic hemiparesis (n=83, 27.4%) and in those with mixed form of CP (n=59, 19.5%). When we analyzed the more important risk factors for epilepsy in CP we found a statistically significant relationship between epilepsy and brain malformations (RR = 1.27). All types of seizures can occur in children with CP, focal seizures were the most common in our study (n = 181, 34.7%), followed by secondary generalized (n = 154, 29.6%) and generalized (tonic, clonic, tonic-clonic) seizures (n = 132, 25.3%). Epileptic seizures in children with CP tend to have an early onset, 43.5% of them happened within the first year of the child's life. We demonstrated a higher percentage of epilepsy in children with CP and mental retardation - 83.8% (n = 254), while only 15.8% (n = 48) of children with CP and normal intelligence have epilepsy.
We found that an early onset of epileptic seizures correlated with more severe mental retardation. We found that children with spastic quadriparesis have the highest rate of drug-resistent epilepsy.