ON epilepsy, suicide and depression

I went this weekend to an epilepsy conference put on by the Department of Neurology at Vanderbilt Hospital.  One of the subjects I was most looking to hearing about was “mood disorders and epilepsy” that was one of their main workshops.  I got some figures that were truly amazing.  I thought they were worthy of being shared.

Among the facts:

• People with epilepsy were 5-20 times more likely than the rest of the population to have depression.
• People with depression were 4-7 times more likely than the rest of the population to have seizures.
• If someone with epilepsy had depression there were twice as likely to have the kind of seizures resistant to medication.
• People with epilepsy had a suicide rate three times higher than the rest of the population.
• People with epilepsy and depression had a suicide rate 32 times higher than the rest of the population.  If they had temporal lobe epilepsy the rate was at its highest.

I was astounded by my of what I heard.  They had no real explanations for some of these correlations.  It was not simply a matter of people becoming depressed in reaction to epilepsy, although for some people that was without question the answer.  It seemed more that the two processes were paralell  but no one was sure why.

The workshop was great.  I left with a lot of things swirling through my head I had never even thought about before.