Risk of epilepsy after head trauma.

摘要

Head trauma is an important cause of epilepsy, and knowledge of the extent of the risk of epilepsy after head trauma and the factors that influence this risk are essential. In The Lancet today, Jakob Christensen and colleagues present their population-based cohort study of more than 1-5 million people born in Denmark between 1977 and 2002, and followed up for that period. 78572 of them had at least one head injury and 17470 were diagnosed with epilepsy, of whom 1017 had had a head injury before diagnosis. These researchers obtained the data from the Danish National Hospital Register, which provided diagnostic coding on inpatients from 1977, and outpatients from 1995, on epilepsy and head injury. Family history was ascertained by linkage of data from first-degree relatives. The researchers compared the relative risks of development of epilepsy for people with mild and severe head injury (with or without a family history of epilepsy) on a yearly basis with those for people without head injury, while controlling for age, sex, and calendar year.