Psychiatric Comorbidities in Epileptic Patients: The Role of Age, Gender and Duration of Epilepsy in North of Iran

Psychiatric disorders in epileptic patients have an important role on the clinical approach and therapeutic options that are often neglected and treated poorly. The present study aimed to determine the role of psychiatric comorbidity in epileptic patients of Babol, north of Iran.

This descriptive-analytical study was conducted in 2017 with a simple random sampling method on patients with epilepsy who admitted to the neurology department of Ayatollah Rouhani Hospital of Babol. The demographic checklist and SCL90 questionnaire were used. The Chi-square, T-test, Mann-Whitney, Pearson correlation coefficient and test-retest were used in SPSS V18 and P

Among the 150 examined patients, 88 (58.7%) were female and 63(42%) had epilepsy more than 10 years. The most common psychiatric disorder among epileptic patients was depression (68 patients = 45.3%) and anxiety (65 patients = 43.3%) patients. Also, the lowest prevalence was related to paranoid ideation and psychotic disorders. There was a significant relationship between age with somatic disorders (P=0.02) and phobia (P=0.01).

Anxiety and depression were the most common symptoms in epileptic patients. With an increase in age, the frequency of somatic disorders and phobias was significantly increased.