The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on epilepsy patients

Abstract

Background: Pandemics like the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) bring along many individual and social problems. We aimed to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on anxiety, depression, and quality of life in patients with epilepsy and if seizures worsened because of it.

Methods: During their routine outpatient follow-up appointments, the patients were probed using questionnaires prepared in advance and we also administered Beck depression and Hamilton anxiety scales to the patients.

Results: The mean age of the patients was 34.9 years and 39.5% of the patients were male. It was asked whether patients had problems accessing medications, hospitals, and doctors or whether they had difficulty receiving tests such as EEG-MRI, and 14.9 % of the patients said they had issues accessing them. About 6.8% of all patients and 5/17 patients with COVID-19 infection reported an increase in seizure frequency of more than 50%. While 49 (30.3%) of 161 patients stated they had insomnia during the pandemic period, 58 (36.02%) patients said they started to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression during the pandemic period. Depression was diagnosed in 71 (44.1%), and anxiety was observed in 34 (21.2%) of 161 patients.

Conclusion: As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine measures, epilepsy patients have been affected significantly. There was a considerable rise in the number of seizures in a large number of patients, and most of them expressed anxiety, depression symptoms, and insomnia. These rates were observed to be greater in individuals who had refractory epilepsy and a history of COVID infection.