Risk of Epilepsy After Traumatic Brain Injury
It has been well known that traumatic brain injury increases the risk of epilepsy. However, the duration of that risk is not well defined. In the February issue of The Lancet, Jakob Christensen and his colleagues at the University of AARHUS, Denmark, conducted a population-based cohort study of more than 1.5 million people born in Denmark between 1977 and 2002 and followed up for that period. They found that 78,572 individuals had sustained at least one head injury and that 17,470 were diagnosed with epilepsy, of whom 1,017 had had a head injury before diagnosis.
Dr. Christensen found that the “Relative risks of epilepsy were raised about twofold after a mild head injury and sevenfold after a severe head injury, were slightly greater in women than men, and increased with older age at time of injury.” Most important, this study found an increased risk more than ten years after mild brain injury, severe brain injury and skull fracture. They found that “The risk of epilepsy increased slightly with age at time of mild brain injury and was highest for people over fifteen years of age, indicating that susceptibility to epilepsy after brain injury increases with age.”
For neurolawyers, this is an important study documenting that the risk for epilepsy following mild brain injury is not one of short duration.