Clinical characteristics of adult epilepsy patients in the 1997 Hong Kong epilepsy registry.
OBJECTIVE
To study the clinical characteristics of 2952 patients with epilepsy who had received drug treatment from the neurology outpatient clinics of eight major hospitals in Hong Kong.


METHODS
Retrospective review of outpatient records.


RESULTS
1601 (54.3%) males and 1351 (45.7%) females with a median age of 35.8 years (range, 10-94.8) were studied. Seizure types included generalized tonic-clonic in 80.7% of patients, complex partial in 28.3%, simple partial in 14.4%, atypical absence in 2.6% and myoclonic in 1.4%, and 30.4% of patients had more than one seizure type. EEG, CT brain, MRI brain and neuropsychological evaluation were obtained in 81.2%, 61.7%, 17.0% and 2.2% of patients, respectively. The etiology of epilepsy was cryptogenic in 59.9%, symptomatic in 35.1% and idiopathic in 3.9%; the commonest were intracranial infection, cerebral vascular disease, cranial trauma and perinatal insult. Phenytoin, carbamazepine and valproate were the most frequently used drugs and 25.9% of patients were taking more than two drugs. 48.3% of patients had active seizures in the past six months and 26.4% were considered to have unsatisfactory control of their epilepsy. Medical refractoriness of epilepsy was associated with a history of perinatal insult, intracranial infection, congenital brain malformation, intracranial neoplasm, cerebral vascular disease, hippocampal sclerosis, mental retardation and a history of status epilepticus (P < 0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
In this local cohort of adult patients with epilepsy under specialist care, there were a considerable number of patients falling into the category of cryptogenic epilepsy. Risk factors associated with medical refractoriness are similar to previous studies.
Ng
K K
KK
Division of Neurology, Department of Medicine, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 30 Gascoigne Road, Hong Kong, China. ngkakui@hotmail.com
Ng
P W
PW
Tsang
K L
KL
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002648:Child; D004827:Epilepsy / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005260:Female; D006723:Hong Kong / Q000453:epidemiology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012042:Registries; D012189:Retrospective Studies