ArticlesAge-specific incidence and prevalence rates of treated epilepsy in an unselected population of 2 052 922 and age-specific fertility rates of women with epilepsy
Introduction
Over 99% of people in the UK are registered with a general practitioner, which provides an opportunity to gather epidemiological data on the health and morbidity of unselected populations of patients. A knowledge of the incidence and prevalence of any disease is important for planning medical services. The Office for National Statistics' General Practice Research Database (GPRD) holds anonymous records of 3·6 million patients from more than 500 general practices in England and Wales, which represents over 6% of the total population of England and Wales.1, 2 The GPRD is an unrivalled source of continuous data on the diagnosis and treatment of illness in general practice, and has been extensively validated.1 We used this database to report the age-specific period prevalence and incidence rates of treated epilepsy in 2 052 922 people, and the age-specific fertility rates in 1991–95 of women with treated epilepsy. Our study is the largest on incidence and prevalence of treated epilepsy reported to date in the UK, and is the only contemporary population-based study to investigate fertility rates. We selected patients taking treatment since this population is the key group for rational planning of services for epilepsy.
Section snippets
Incidence and prevalence rates of treated epilepsy
Population and case ascertainment—We used data from 294 computerised general practices that entered complete data in the GRPD during the study year (1995). All regions in England and Wales were represented. The database comprised 2 052 922 people with a similar age and sex distribution to that published in 1991 national census figures. We identified prevalent and incident cases of treated epilepsy in this population.
We defined prevalent cases as all patients who had received a prescription for
Prevalence and incidence rates
Table 1 shows the incidence and period prevalence of treated epilepsy by 5-year age categories in 1995, and the raw data on which these figures are based; figure 1 shows the respective graphs for prevalence and incidence.
Fertility rates
Table 2 and Figure 2, Figure 3 show the fertility rates for women aged 15–44 years with epilepsy by age-groups compared with the rates for the general UK population, together with the age-specific standardised fertility ratios. There was a significant reduction in fertility
Discussion
Previous studies have reported data on overall rates of epilepsy in the UK, but none in a population of this large size, and few in which the treatment status has been reported.4 Incidence rates of epilepsy worldwide have varied between 11 and 190 per 100 000 people; most countries have rates of 40–80 per 100 000 people. The differences between countries can be largely accounted for by differences in methodology and definitions. Previous UK studies reported rates of 63, 52, and 48 per 100 000
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