Disclosure of interest
The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 March 2020
Epilepsy is the second most common cause of premorbid mortality in the ID population. Rates of SUDEP are considered up to 9 times higher in the ID population. Cornwall UK (population 600.000 i.e. 1% of UK) runs a specialist ID epilepsy community service for adults with ID. It delivers reasonable adjustments and person centered care to this population. We measured how service outcomes on SUDEP compared to regional and national averages.
Data of all Cornwall epilepsy deaths 2004–2015 using the Cornwall Coroner's database and the Public Health Cornwall was reviewed systemically. We identified patients with and without ID.
There were 113 epilepsy deaths of which 57 were SUDEPs of which 3 were identified to have a clinical diagnosis of ID. In another 2 cases it was not evident if they had an ID or not. None of the 5 was known to the ID Epilepsy service. Mean and 95% confidence intervals were calculated using a binomial calculation, making no prior assumptions about the population distribution.
Cornwall's specialist ID epilepsy service is a rarity in the UK. A recent study using the Leicestershire ID Register revealed 26 people with ID of the total deaths of 83 SUDEP. This contrasts greatly with Cornwall only 5.26% of SUDEP deaths had ID compared to 23.4% in Leicestershire and similarly when compared to neighboring Plymouth (population 300.000) which had 26% ID deaths in its SUDEPs between 2004–2012. It is possible that having an ID dedicated epilepsy service saves lives.
The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
Comments
No Comments have been published for this article.