Epilepsy and schizophrenia
People affected by epilepsy are nearly eight times more likely than not they are of developing schizophrenia and schizophrenia sufferers are also six times more likely to have epilepsy that people are not, suggests a new study.
Researchers in Taiwan say that this double relationship between the two conditions could be due to genetic causes, environmental and neurobiological.
After analyzing data on nearly 5.200 patients with schizophrenia and more than 11,500 epilepsy patients and controls matched for age and sex in both groups, the researchers found that the prevalence of epilepsy was higher in the schizophrenia patient group with about 7 thousand years, compared to just over one per thousand among those not affected by schizophrenia.
The study, published in the journal Epilepsy, also showed that the prevalence of schizophrenia was about 3.5 per thousand person-years for patients with epilepsy, compared to about 0.5 among those without epilepsy. The researchers noted that the incidence of schizophrenia was slightly higher among men with the disease than women.
“The results of our research show a strong bidirectional relationship between schizophrenia and epilepsy,” he said in a news release from the journal the study’s lead author, Dr. I-Ching Chou, associate professor of China Medical University in Taichung, Taiwan. “This relationship could be due to a common pathogenesis in these diseases, including genetic susceptibility and environmental factors, but more research on disease mechanisms.”
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