English

Abstract

BACKGROUND Epilepsy is a very common serious chronic neurological disorder in the elderly aged 60 years and above. Epidemiologic studies have shown that the incidence of epilepsy is significantly higher in the elderly than in any other age group and aetiology, clinical manifestations and treatment responses are different from epilepsy in younger individuals. We evaluated the causes of seizure disorder in elderly people presenting to the medicine and neurology department and various clinical presentation of seizure disorders in the elderly. METHODS This was a cross-sectional, observational study of 200 patients done at our centre for two years and was extensively clinically, biochemically and radiologically evaluated. SPSS Statistics v25, SAS Studio 3.7 and Excel were primarily used for analyzing data. After the collection of all data, they were first arranged in an SPSS datasheet and then analysed by SPSS software. RESULTS The male to female ratio was 1.63:1. Females have an equal propensity to develop generalized tonic-clonic seizure (GTCS) (47.4 %) or focal seizure (45.7 %) whereas males have a higher propensity for GTCS (79 %). GTCS was seen in 134 cases, focal seizures in 60 cases and status epilepticus was found in 6 cases. The most common cause of GTCS in our study was stroke followed by metabolic causes. Of metabolic causes, the commonest cause was hyponatremia, most common cause of focal seizure (30 % of all cases) were infective. The overall commonest cause was a stroke. Neuroimaging plays an important role in the workup of patients with epilepsy imaging and abnormality was found in 69 % of cases in our study. CONCLUSIONS The present study was a hospital-based cross-sectional study; therefore the results of the study cannot be projected over the general population. The study may be limited by the relatively small sample size and the homogeneity of the ethnicity of the participants. KEY WORDS Epilepsy, Elderly, GTCS, Focal Seizure, Stroke.