The Clinical Profile of Childhood Epilepsy in Sudanese Children Attending the Neurology Department in Soba Hospital (Khartoum)

Background: Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder affecting around 1% of children. The incidence in Sudan is likely to be higher given the high rate of genetic and acquired disorders caused by CNS infection and birth injury. Epilepsy can be idiopathic or non-idiopathic, symptomatic epilepsy indicates a known cause while cryptogenic epilepsy implies and unknown cause.

Objective: To understand the demographic and clinical characteristics of epilepsy in children in the setting of a tertiary epilepsy clinic in Khartoum, Sudan.

Methods: This is a hospital-based cross sectional study recruiting patients with epilepsy attending atertiary pediatric neurology clinic.All patients attending the clinic in the 6 month period were included in the study.
Data was collected by medical students and was analyzed on IBM SPSS Version 20.0 in a descriptive fashion.

Results: 284 Children were recruited. The mean age for children with epilepsy was 5.74 (range 0-12 Years). Females constituted 59.9%, while 94.7% of patients were of low socioeconomic status. The most common type of seizures found were generalized tonic clinic at 51.8% (147/284), followed by focal seizures at 21.1% (60/284).
71% ofour patients (201/284) had no identifiable cause (idiopathic), while 29% were non-idiopathic. Of the non-idiopathic group; 41% were due to congenital anomalies, followed by HIE at 24.1%, infections at 16.9% trauma at 10.8% and tumors at 7.2%.
Only 18.3% (52/284) had a positive family history of epilepsy.

Conclusions: There appears to be a higher incidence of epilepsy in Children with low socio – economic status with a slight female predominance.
The incidence of idiopathic epilepsy appears to be similar to international figures; which may indicate that some children with severe symptomatic epilepsy die at an early age.
We acknowledge that this is a hospital based study and recommend broader community based and long-term studies to define the disorder.