Study on depression,anxiety and quality of life in adult patients with epilepsy

Objective To investigate the prevalence of depression or anxiety and the risk factors for them in adult epilepsy patients.To evaluate the effect of depression or anxiety on quality of life in epilepsy patients. Methods We used Beck Depression Inventory,Beck Anxiety Inventory and QOLIE-31 Chinese version to evaluate depression,anxiety and quality of life in 200 epilepsy patients. Results In our study 43.5% patients suffered from depression,28.5% of them associated with anxiety and 23% patients had both depression and anxiety.Frequent seizures and no paid profession were found to be the risk factors for depression, no paid profession was the risk factor for anxiety .The QOLIE-31 overall score and other subdomain score of depression group and the depression associated with anxiety group were lower than non-anxiety-depression group (P=0.000).The QOLIE-31 overall score(P=0.004), seizure worry(P=0.019) and cognitive function domains(P=0.009)of anxiety group were lower than non-anxiety-depression group. Conclusion Depression and anxiety are common psychiatric symptoms in epilepsy patients which have seriously affected the patients's quality of life .Control of seizures and provide more employment opportunities are important to improve the quality of life of epilepsy patients.