Abstract
Increasingly, there has been an interest in the association between epilepsy and autism.
The high frequency of autism in some of the early-onset developmental encephalopathic
epilepsies is frequently cited as evidence of the relationship between autism and
epilepsy. While these specific forms of epilepsy carry a higher-than-expected risk
of autism, most, if not all, of the association may be due to intellectual disability
(ID). The high prevalence of interictal EEG discharges in children with autism is
also cited as further evidence although errors in the diagnosis of epilepsy seem to
account for at least part of those findings. The prevalence of ID is substantially
elevated in children with either epilepsy or autism. In the absence of ID, there is
little evidence of a substantial, if any, increased risk of autism in children with
epilepsy. Further, although the reported prevalence of autism has increased over the
last several years, much of this increase may be attributable to changes in diagnostic
practices, conceptualization of autism in the presence of ID, and laws requiring provision
of services for children with autism. In the context of these temporal trends, any
further efforts to tease apart the relationships between epilepsy, ID, and autism
will have to address head-on the accuracy of diagnosis of all three conditions before
we can determine whether there is, indeed, a special relationship between autism and
epilepsy.
Keywords
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Article info
Publication history
Accepted:
January 24,
2012
Received:
January 24,
2012
Footnotes
☆Funding: ATB was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke R37-NS31146.
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 Elsevier Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
