Morbidity Risk for Seizures and Epilepsy in Offspring of Patients with Epilepsy

Abstract

For more than a century family studies on the morbidity risk in offspring of patients with epilepsy have contributed to a better understanding of the genetic background of epilepsy and have provided basic data for genetic counseling in this field. The quotations in the review by Newmark and Penry [23] from 1980 date back to 1880, when Eccheverria [15] and Gowers [16] already knew about the increased morbidity in offspring of their epileptic patients. This century has contributed several family studies, mainly on selected populations based on clinic referrals (Table 1) [1, 4, 13, 17, 20, 22, 26]. The more recent studies by Tsuboi and Endo in 1977 [26], Annegers et al. in 1976 [3] and 1978 [4], Janz and Scheffner [20], and Beck-Mannagetta and Lipinski [7] in 1980, and Janz and Beck-Mannagetta [20] and Beck-Mannagetta and Janz [8] in 1982 have confirmed, though based on different populations and referring to different morbidity risk periods, that there is an overall risk of epilepsy in offspring of epileptic parents of between 3% and 4%, and that the risk is even higher for offspring of patients with certain types of seizures. This morbidity risk is 2–4 times greater than that in the general population, based on the assumption that the cumulative incidence of 1.1% by the age of 25 years ascertained from the Rochester population [18] can be used as a comparison for studies performed elsewhere than in the United States.