[Comorbid depression in patients with epilepsy treated with single and multiple drug therapy]

A seizure is a disturbance of movement, feeling or consciousness occasioned by sudden, inappropriate and excessive electrical discharges in the grey matter of the brain. The most common psychiatric disorder in epilepsy is interictal depression, with lifetime prevalence of 40 to 60%. Particular attention should be paid to suicidal ideations, due to the fact that most of the patients have easy access to potentially lethal when overdosed, antiepileptic drugs. The aim of our paper is to determine the presence of depressive symptoms in epileptic patients according to their treatment protocols (monotherapy or polytherapy), gender, age, social status, age when diagnosed, type and frequency of seizures. Prospective evaluation of monotherapy and polytherapy in 60 subjects, (30 subjects in each group), who were diagnosed with epilepsy. Assessment of depressive symptoms was performed with the use of BDI scale. In both groups there was a similar structure according to gender, mean age was 34 (with an s.d. of 11.06). More than 96 percent of the subjects had low or average socioeconomic status. Average age of first attack was 20.43 (with an s.d. of 11.9). In the group treated with monotherapy there was the biggest number of generalized convulsive seizures, and in the group treated with polyantiepileptic therapy there was the biggest number of partial complex seizures. Symptoms of moderate and severe depression were registered in 33% patients treated with monotherapy and 60% of patients treated with polytherapy (t = 2.198, for p less than 0.05). 16.7 percent of the patients had suicidal ideation. On the basis of our research we can conclude that significantly more frequent and severe depressive symptoms were found in the group of epileptic patients who were treated with polytherapy. In those patients the occurrence of partial complex seizures was the biggest, and their frequency was weekly or even daily.