Epilepsy in children
Around 2% of epileptic patients in the western world are children with around 125 new cases per year for every 1 million population.
About 75 percent of all children with epilepsy are seizure-free with medical treatment. About half the children with epilepsy outgrow the problem and only require treatment for some years.
School
Certain school difficulties may follow in the wake of the epilepsy in children even if the child is otherwise well functioning and correctly medicated.
It has for many years been the view that children with epilepsy educationally are no different from other children. This is true a long way but there are some problems that afflict the majority of children with epilepsy. These difficulties can also be seen in other children, but there is a clear accumulation of these problems in children with epilepsy. The most common consequence is problems with short-term memory. This problem is very troubling for the child and they often mentally block or give up completely saying 'I cannot remember it". It is important to teach children some techniques, which to some extent can compensate for these problems.
Attention problems
A conservative guess is that half of children with epilepsy have attention problems of varying degrees. Attention problems can be a companion of all forms of epilepsy, but is most marked in the cases where treatment proves difficult.
Attention problems might also occur in well medicated seizure-free children where perhaps the surroundings not even associate the attention problem with the epilepsy.
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