Abstracts

Abstract

Purpose: To evaluate whether children with epilepsy experience different depressive and anxiety symptoms than other children do. Method: In the study participated 60 children with epilepsy [26 (43.4%) males, age mean 13.8 (2.8) years], 67 children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) [19 (28.4%) males, age mean 13.6 (2.9) years], and 75 healthy children [46 (61.6%), age mean 13.6 (3.1) years]. The Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) was used for anxiety and the Mood and Feeling Questionnaire (MFQ) for depressive symptoms assessment. Results: In a series of multivariate analyses, controlled for gender due to significant differences between the groups (p < 0.01), it were observed negligible differences between the groups in expressing particular depressive and anxiety symptoms. Only one of 33 depressive and two of 41 anxiety symptoms differed among children with epilepsy than among the other two. However, several depressive symptoms specifically clustered among children with epilepsy such as "feeling upset", "thinking about death or dying", "feelings being a bad person", "feelings working things wrongly, and "sleeping more than usual". Considered together, they accounted for 95.6% of the total variance in levels of all depressive symptoms expressed. Additionally, several anxiety symptoms also specifically clustered among children with epilepsy such as "when frightened, hard to breathe", "worry about being good", "told that worry too much", "don't like to be away from the family", "worry that something bad might happen to the parents", and "worry about what is going to happen". They accounted for 95% of the total variance in levels of all anxiety symptoms expressed. Conclusion: Based on symptom-level analyses, children with epilepsy experience the same depressive and anxiety symptoms as children with JIA and healthy children. However, there might be different clusters of symptoms specific to children with epilepsy, which might have clinical implications.