Epilepsy in Nigerian children with cerebral palsy in Enugu

Abstract

Cerebral palsy (CP) and epilepsy are the two most common chronic neurological diseases encountered by pediatric neurologists in Nigeria. Though epilepsy is commonly encountered among children with CP, there are very few studies on the prevalence of epilepsy among Nigerian children with CP and factors that are associated with this. This study was undertaken to determine the prevalence of epilepsy among children with CP and elucidate the factors that influences this. It was a retrospective analysis of the case files of consecutive children that presented at the pediatric neurology unit of university of Nigeria teaching hospital, Enugu with a diagnosis of CP from 1st January 2007 to 31st December 2009. CP occurred in 20.8% of the children that presented at the pediatric neurology clinic. Spastic quadriplegic CP (55.5%) was the predominant type of CP encountered and the common causes were severe birth asphyxia (48.2%) and neonatal jaundice (20.1%). Epilepsy was observed in 37.8% of the children with CP. The common types of epileptic seizures observed were generalized tonic clonic seizures (38.7%), complex partial seizures (19.4%) and mixed epilepsy (19.4%). Infantile spasms and mixed epilepsy were observed predominantly among children with quadriplegic CP while those with hemiplegic CP almost exclusively presented with partial seizures (P = 0.01). We conclude that epilepsy is common among children with CP and severe seizure types like infantile spasm and mixed epilepsies are more common among quadriplegic CP.

Keywords

Cerebral palsy - epilepsy - birth asphyxia - neonatal jaundice