Academic Achievement of Children with Epilepsy

Abstract

The academic achievement scores of 122 children with epilepsy were examined in relation to demographic and clinical seizure variables. As a group, these children were making less academic progress than expected for their age and IQ level. Academic deficiencies were greatest in arithmetic, followed by spelling, reading, comprehension, and word recognition. Results of the multiple regression analyses indicated a modest combined predictive significance of the demographic and clinical seizure variables for academic performance. In addition, the magnitude of these relationships varied by academic area. Among the individual variables examined the strongest correlates of academic performance were age of the child, age of seizure onset, lifetime total seizure frequency, and presence of multiple seizures (absence and tonic-clonic). These results are discussed in relation to developing an understanding of the factors which underlie academic vulnerability in children with epilepsy.

Academic performance in children with new-onset seizures and asthma: A prospective study

“…Intractable epilepsy in children with onset before age two has been associated with poor cognitive functioning (38). Moreover, in the sample of children with new-onset seizures, our finding that academic performance among those with recurrent seizures tended to decline over time is consistent with results from previous research (7,8,10,32), emphasizing the importance of identifying academic difficulties among children with seizures as early as possible so that interventions may be implemented that limit the progression of problems. This finding is even more important in light of the fact that our sample included only children with normal development and they were starting to show decline over time.…”

“…Although some early studies reported higher academic achievement for females than for males with epilepsy (16-18), others found no main effect for gender (7,19). In a recent study, Austin and colleagues (10) found males with high severity epilepsy to have the most risk for underachievement.…”

“…Younger age at onset of seizures has been associated with higher rates of academic underachievement (7,8,(11)(12)(13). Furthermore, earlier age at onset of recurrent seizures was found to be the strongest predictor of cognitive impairment, including academic achievement, in children with complex partial seizures (13).…”

“…There was a trend for younger children to decline more than older children. Keywords academic achievement; pediatric; epilepsy; school; teacher ratings Children with chronic seizures experience more academic problems than healthy children or children with other chronic health conditions, such as asthma (1-6), and also make less academic progress than would be expected for their age and intelligence quotient (IQ) level, (7,8). In longitudinal studies, children with chronic epilepsy failed to show improvement in academic performance over time and, despite an improvement in their seizure conditions, continued to perform worse than a healthy control group (9) and an asthma comparison sample (10).…”

“…Williams et al (19) found no differences in performance on cognitive measures between children with new-onset seizures before and after six months of treatment with AEDs compared to children with recently diagnosed diabetes mellitus. Increased seizure frequency has been negatively related to performance in some studies (7,(23)(24)(25)(26), although other studies found that seizure variables were not strongly related to academic achievement (2,4,14,27).To more clearly define the etiology and natural history of academic difficulties, longitudinal studies beginning early in the course of the seizure disorder are needed. To date, only four studies have examined academic problems among children with new-onset seizures, and in two of the studies (4,14) data on children with both new-onset and chronic seizures were combined and not reported separately.…”