Faculty Publications

Title

Childhood Epilepsy and Asthma: Comparison of Quality of Life

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Childhood, Childhood asthma, Epilepsy, Quality of life

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Epilepsia

Volume

35

Issue

3

First Page

608

Last Page

615

Abstract

Summary: We report results from the first data collection on an ongoing longitudinal study aimed at describing thenatural history of adaptation to childhood epilepsy andasthma in children and their families. We studied 136 children with epilepsy and 134 children with asthma aged 8–12 years. Data were collected from the children, theirmothers, and their school teachers through interviews, school records, and questionnaires. The two sampleswere compared on four domains of quality of life: physical, psychological, social, and school. Data were analyzed by a 2 × 2 between‐subjects multivariate analysis ofcovariance with type of illness (epilepsy or asthma) as theindependent variable and length of time since onset ofillness as a covariate. A significant main effect was notedfor illness [multivariate F (15, 236) = 11.36, p < 0.001].Our major finding was that children with epilepsy had arelatively more compromised quality of life in the psychological, social, and school domains. In contrast, children with asthma had a more compromised quality of lifein the physical domain. Our findings suggest that attention simply to seizure control in the clinical setting willnot address the full range of quality‐of‐life problems ofchildren with epilepsy. Copyright © 1994, Wiley Blackwell. All rights reserved

Original Publication Date

1-1-1994

DOI of published version

10.1111/j.1528-1157.1994.tb02481.x

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