The Patients' Long-Term Insight into Day-to-Day Functioning After Establishing the Functional Seizures Diagnosis

Functional seizures (FSs) are paroxysmal, time-limited events with motor, sensory, autonomic, or cognitive manifestations related to pathophysiological processes other than abnormal electric discharges in the brain. However, these seizures are often followed by different psychiatric comorbidities. Their impact on the overall quality of life and the cofounding factors, especially the ones that can be treated, were the main investigation aims of this study.

This study comprised 76 patients who were diagnosed with FSs. This study included patients who were diagnosed with FSs via video-EEG telemetry. We used the "Likert scale" from the QOLIE 31 questionnaire to evaluate patients' subjective perception of their quality of life. We researched the association of various clinical factors with the subjective QoL score.

A statistically significant marginal association was shown for seven variables, four of them with a positive association (subjective perception of disease severity, belief in treatments' positive effects, functional seizure cessation, and not being afraid of next seizure) and three of them with a negative association (age at FS onset, depression symptoms, and current age of life). After Bonferroni correction for multiple testing only symptoms of depression stayed statistically significantly associated with outcome. Multivariable logistic regression following variable selection identified that six variables (age at FS onset, absence of psychiatric testing, perceiving oneself as mentally changed due to the disease, seizure severity, depressive symptoms, and fear of therapy side effects) were statistically significantly negatively associated with the outcome.

It seems that patients who have FSs coexisting with depressive symptoms and also those with worse disease perception have less chances to be satisfied with their overall quality of life.