30% epileptic patients reported increased seizures during pandemic: Study

JAIPUR: Anxiety levels among epileptic patients during the pandemic have gone up leading to increase in seizures during the lockdown period. This has been mainly due to fear of Covid-19, and despite being assured that they were not infected, they continued to be anxious, revealed a study by city-based

neurologists

.

Rampal (name changed), a 55-year-old epileptic patient from Churu, called his neurologist in Jaipur expressing fear of getting infected. He did not have any symptoms, but the anxiety caused frequent seizures. His doctors counselled him to make him believe that he is not infected.

When the city-based neurologists investigated further to find out if other epileptic patients were behaving the same, they found that Rampal was not the only one, there were other epileptic patients who complained of the same problem.

The stress of pandemic induces

sleep deprivation

and lifestyle changes and can make a person prone to seizures, says the study titled ‘Impact of COVID-19 on people suffering with

epilepsy

’ by two neurologists Dr RK Sureka and Dr Medha Gupta and psychiatrist Dr Vikas Gaur.

The pandemic had affected epileptic patients and increased seizure frequency, depression, anxiety, unemployment and financial difficulty in obtaining medication, the report added.

“We found that 53.8% patients were worried about getting infected and could not stop thoughts coming and bothering them. Around 50.8% of patients were afraid of the ailment and 15.9 % thought that they had been infected by corona despite being reassured by other people,” Sureka said.

The study shows that 30.3% patients had increased seizure frequency during the pandemic. Majority of the patients (71.9%) had consulted their doctors by going to hospitals and only 28% patients had used

telemedicine

facility to consult. Around 55.3% patients also reported to have faced problems in obtaining medicine due to lack of money. More than 60% of patients were afraid of going to hospital and had faced difficulties in reaching hospitals.

As many as 132 patients suffering with epilepsy participated in the study. Majority (67.7%) of patients was unemployed and 63.6% cases were from low socioeconomic class with 50% patients with income of less than Rs 3,000 per month.

During the study, it was found that all the epileptic patients had heard about coronavirus and was acquainted with its symptoms.

Analysing the epidemic (given to hemen)

Coronavirus has caused a psychological crisis but investigators were not able to observe any significant effect of the epidemic on epileptic patients

Around 17-22% of patients reported depression symptoms while another 20-22% showed anxiety symptoms

Overall, around 25 (18.9%) participants admitted that epidemic has negatively affected their personal, social and occupational life

Epilepsy is one of the most common problems in

neurology

clinical practice