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Hospital-diagnosed pertussis associated with epilepsy risk in Danish children
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Danish children diagnosed with pertussis were more likely to develop childhood-onset epilepsy than children in the general population in a recent study.
“In Denmark, risk of epilepsy was increased in children with hospital-diagnosed pertussis infections compared with the general population; however, the absolute risk was low,” Morten Olsen, MD, PhD, of the department of clinical epidemiology at the Aarhus University Hospital, and colleagues wrote. “According to these data, epilepsy risk did not vary according to the specified categories of age at pertussis diagnosis.”
The researchers used the Danish National Patient Registry to form a cohort of 4,700 patients diagnosed with pertussis in all Danish hospitals from 1978 through 2011. Each patient in the pertussis cohort was matched to 10 members in the general population. The researchers monitored patient records for epilepsy diagnoses within 15 years of pertussis diagnoses.
Study data showed that 90 patients with pertussis developed epilepsy (IR = 1.56; 95% CI, 1.55-1.57, per 1,000 person-years) compared with 511 in the general population (IR = 0.88; 95% CI, 0.88-0.88, per 1,000 person-years). Olsen and colleagues reported that the risk for epilepsy was higher in the pertussis cohort (HR = 1.7; 95% CI, 1.4%-2.1%) at age 10 years compared with 0.9% (95% CI, 0.8%-1%) in the general cohort.
The researchers posit that hypoxic brain damage caused by pertussis outcomes, such as coughing, could explain the association between epilepsy and pertussis.
“The role of immunity and inflammatory processes in epilepsy is increasingly recognized, following the identification of proinflammatory markers and autoantibodies in several epileptic disorders of unknown etiology,” Olsen and colleagues wrote. “However, the basis for these processes has not been established. Too few of the patients with pertussis were diagnosed with complications such as postpertussis seizures to examine the effects of complications on risk of epilepsy in this study.” – by David Costill
Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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