What is the First Step in Improving Epilepsy Care?

Epilepsy is type of neurological disorder causing sporadic seizures on a regular basis without warning needs long-term management to record their symptoms for better prognosis needs a reliable and efficient method to measure the outcome. Though Electronic Medical Records (EMR) are used frequently for research and quality improvement do not document important outcome measures such as seizure frequency or quality of life needs standardized way to enable researchers to process large-scale data on the subject.

So, the researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) demonstrates to use standardized reporting of clinical data for seizures caused by a variety of neurological disorders, providing fundamental baseline information to determine methods for keeping seizures under control published today in the journal Epilepsia.

"For those of us who treat paediatric epilepsy patients, we are constantly trying to assess how we're doing and how we can improve outcomes for our patients," said Mark P. Fitzgerald, MD, PhD, a paediatric neurologist in the Division of Neurology at CHOP and first author of the study.

They looked over almost 1,700 visits by more than 1,000 individual patients with childhood epilepsies for approximately one year with visits conducted by 32 different providers across the CHOP Network were able to quantify the absolute seizure burden as well as changes in seizure burden over time and the differences between various causes. .

This study represents fundamental data regarding treatment can make major paradigm shift in paediatric epilepsy long term management.

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Source-Medindia