Epilepsy – Statistics

Transcript

With respect to who gets epilepsy, It’s interesting because there’s a bit of a, a misconception and that is that everybody with epilepsy has it from childhood. I think there are a lot of people have this vision of a child with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair and that’s what epilepsy is. And in the 1990s through some epidemiologic studies we realized that actually isn’t exactly true. Yes, there’s a spike in the occurrence of epilepsy in childhood and in young age, maybe around 10 it does start to peter off and through your 20s and 30s and 40s it’s relatively infrequent and stays relatively stable. And then you hit about age 55 and we realized there was an increase in the incidence of epilepsy. And after about age 65, the incidence of epilepsy appears to be higher than in any other age group. So as people get older, new cases of epilepsy are much more common than we thought. Now the question is, well why, where are these coming from? It’s probably mostly related to post-stroke, epilepsy, but in general thing, people are living longer, living through things that in the past they didn’t, they didn’t live through, whether that’s brain trauma, cancer, or strokes, and that’s where they’re coming from.