[Psychological profile of patients with psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures]

Depending on the accepted definition of the nature of psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures various values of their prevalence are reported in the literature from 5% to over 33% of cases referred to epilepsy treatment centres. According to our knowledge, in Poland these seizures occur in several thousand young individuals (mean age 25 years). The psychological determinants of these psychogenic seizures remain not clear. The purpose of the reported study was a psychological analysis of personality profiles of patients with psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures and epileptic seizures using the results of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test for the assessment of conversion as a possible mechanism of the occurrence of psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures. Using long-term video-EEG monitoring the studied subjects were divided into two groups: group I of 30 subjects (25 women and 5 men) with exclusively psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures, and group II of 27 subjects (23 women and 4 men) with exclusively epileptic seizures. Both groups were subjected to MMPI test. The averaged profiles of these groups differed in the level of hypochondria (Hs--p < or = 0.001) and hysteria (Hy--p < or = 0.005) statistically significantly, and were much higher in patients with psychogenic pseudoepileptic seizures than the depression parameter (D) statistically significantly (p < or = 0.001). Patients with epilepsy had the highest values of depression parameter (D), while Hs and Hy were statistically significantly lower (p 0.01). The analysis in subscales additionally confirmed the role of conversion in pseudoepileptic seizures.