Quality of life in pregnant women with epilepsy versus women with epilepsy

Abstract

It is assumed that 25% of patients with epilepsy are women of fertile age and 0.3% to 0.6% of all children are born of mothers with epilepsy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the quality of life on pregnant with epilepsy and compare with non-pregnant women with epilepsy. We evaluated two groups (Experimental Group - 29 pregnant women with epilepsy and Control Group - 30 women with epilepsy); they were attended at the HC/UNICAMP. The patients had three meetings to carry out and implement the anamnesis and the application of QQV-65. There were no significant differences in the measurement of quality of life when comparing both groups. However, when we analyzed individually in the pre- and post-partum periods, we observed significant differences in health aspects (p=0.0495), physical (p=0.02868) and emotional (p=0.0253) dimensions in QQV-65. This study shows that pregnancy could be interpreted as a stressor. In late pregnancy when this stressor was removed, women with epilepsy had improvement in their quality of life.