For Better Transition from Pediatric to Adult Care for Epilepsy: A Report and Proposals

Transition from pediatric to adult care in a Japanese cohort of childhood-onset epilepsy: prevalence of epileptic syndromes and complexity in the transition

“…Recently, there have been an increasing number of literatures on the transition from pediatric to adult care in North America, Europe, and Japan, mostly in a review basis [4][5][6]13,14,[16][17][18][19]. The most frequent reasons preventing the transition from the pediatric side were that family members were reluctant to move to adult care or that pediatricians were unable to find appropriate facilities for patients with multiple handicaps [5,6,19]. This was one reason why the age of transition in this study was much older than 15-20 years of age.…”

“…As a result, the transition itself has become an important issue not only for pediatric epilepsy, but also for other pediatric subspecialties [4]. Patients with childhood-onset epilepsy who reach adolescence and young adulthood without seizure remission despite long-term antiseizure medications often have difficulty in finding an appropriate adult care facility because of the lack of comprehensive transition programs from pediatric to adult care [5][6][7]. Although the seizure and intellectual prognosis of childhood-onset epilepsy has been steadily improving due to advances in pharmacological and surgical therapies, a significant number of patients with pharmacoresistant epilepsies of various etiology reach adulthood with persistent epileptic seizures and varying neurodevelopmental comorbidities [8,9].…”