Childhood epilepsy recorded in primary care in the UK

Abstract

Objective To examine temporal trends in the incidence of epilepsy recorded in UK primary care and to evaluate the impact of recent efforts to improve the specificity of diagnosis in children. Design Birth cohort study using primary care data from The Health Improvement Network, which includes a representative sample of the UK population of approximately 5%. Methods We identified epilepsy recorded in primary care using relatively specific through to relatively sensitive indicators to identify epilepsy. Incidence estimates were based on 344 718 children aged 0-14 years with 1 447 760 years' follow-up between 1994 and 2008. Trends in cumulative incidence were explored with stratified analysis by year-of-birth. Trends in annual incidence were investigated using Poisson regression with adjustment for age, gender and deprivation.

Incidence of Epilepsy after Neonatal Seizures: A Population-Based Study

“…Our results are comparable to the overall rate reported in Europe as 70/100,000 [2]. Meeraus et al [15] carried out a retrospective study in the United Kingdom and estimated the incidence of childhood epilepsy based on treatment, clinical diagnosis or presentation in primary care clinical records. They found an incidence rate ranging between 70 and 116/100,000 in patients under 14 years of age depending on the indicator used.…”

Serotonin reuptake inhibitors and mortality in epilepsy: A linked primary‐care cohort study

“…15 This definition requires a single Read code for an epilepsy syndrome or two Read codes for symptoms of epilepsy (i.e., codes for nonfebrile seizures on two or more occasions) and two antiepileptic drug codes within 4 months. 15 This definition requires a single Read code for an epilepsy syndrome or two Read codes for symptoms of epilepsy (i.e., codes for nonfebrile seizures on two or more occasions) and two antiepileptic drug codes within 4 months.…”

The direct medical costs of epilepsy in children and young people: A population-based study of health resource utilisation

“…Our study provides new data to the scarcity of cost of illness studies in CYP with epilepsy. As we were including only new cases of epilepsy, cases were required to have both a diagnosis and prescriptions for AEDs, a similar but slightly more specific definition than that used by Meeraus et al (Meeraus et al, 2013) also using the THIN general practice database. There are no standard ways to identify clinical epilepsy using routine health data and no specific studies that have assessed their sensitivity and specificity in children, however, we assessed the external validity of our definition by comparing our cohort's incidence and prevalence (Ali 2012) to that of a UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink study for the same age range of children (Wallace et al, 1998).…”

“…Epilepsy is a serious chronic neurological disorder that has a higher incidence (70-116 per 100,000 person-years) in children and young people (CYP), under 18 years, than in adults (30-55 per 100,000 person-years) (Forsgren et al, 2005;Kotsopoulos et al, 2002;Meeraus et al, 2013). As many clinical subtypes of childhood epilepsy persist into adulthood (Guerrini 2006), epilepsy has long term clinical care requirements and a high economic burden at individual, family, health service and societal levels in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Europe (Pugliatti et al, 2007).…”