[Epidemiological investigation on epilepsy in children of school age (author's transl)]

An epidemiological investigation was carried out in 1976-77 on all children attending the fourth year of primary education (9-10 years old) in Venice. The method of analysis was a questionnaire similar to that proposed by Rose (Epilepsy 1973) and by Meighan (Epilepsy 1976). Out of 1838, 1350 answered the questionnaire. The questionnaire synthesises various symptoms of epilepsy in 30 questions starting from the most severe ones. In a second phase the answers were divided into 8 groups: the hypothesis was that the percentage of children with epilepsy in groups 1-3 (high probability to have epilepsy) would be significantly higher than in groups 4-7. In order to test this hypothesis and to assess the discriminating quality of the questionnaire, a random sample of 114 children was submitted to clinical and EEG examination. The final classification in: A) epilepsy; B) febrile convulsions; C) minimal brain disfunction (M.B.D., according to Rose's definition); D) normal, was agreed upon including the heterogeneous information derived from history, neurological examination and EEG interpretation. A statistical elaboration of the findings has shown that the weighted average prevalence rate resulted to be 8.7%; the one relating to febrile convulsions was 27.93%; the one of M.B.D. was 5.2%. The high incidence of apparently positive cases may be explained because of difficulty in understanding some of the terminology used in the questionnaire; such cases, however, have been identified and discarded after a fuller history and neurological examination had been obtained. The problem of false negative cases seems however more important since it may also be caused by prejudice and by the reluctance of many people to accept the idea of epilepsy. For the appraisal of the incidence of this phenomenon we have examined all children (about 90) in two schools of the city indipendently from the answers in the questionnaire: no case of epilepsy was found. Further investigation is being carried out through an inquiry in EEG laboratories, hospitals and private phisicians in order to find out the real number of epileptic children. The incidence of epilepsy estimated with other methods appears similar to our data (Cooper 1965 - Huser and Kurland 1975). As a conclusion the questionnaire survey approach can be effectively used in studies on epilepsy together with epidemiological investigations in the assessment of cases of epilepsy not yet diagnosed as such.