Analysis of Risk Factors Affecting Epilepsy Seizure Frequency with Statistical Models

Objectives: Epilepsy is a chronic disease that can cause cognitive, psychological, and social problems due to recurrent seizures. Knowledge of the risk of seizure recurrence is crucial for patient treatment management. Therefore, we aimed to statistically evaluate the effects of stress, sleep deprivation, fasting/prolonged hunger, and excessive physical activity on seizure frequency, despite conflicting results in the literature.
Methods: This study prospectively analyzed data from 40 patients and a total of 60 seizures. The correlation between the proportional hazards assumption and survival rank was investigated using Schoenfeld residuals and correlation tests.
Results: This study found that stress, sleep deprivation, fasting/prolonged hunger, and excessive physical activity increased the risk of seizures. However, some additional, unidentified environmental or genetic factors were found to increase seizure risk by 2.7 times within the established model.
Conclusion: While our study found that stress, sleep deprivation, fasting/prolonged hunger, and excessive physical activity may increase seizure frequency, it was also determined that some additional, unidentified environmental or genetic factors affect seizure frequency. The limited sample size, heterogeneity of the patient population, and reliance on patients’ subjective assessments constitute the primary limitations of this study. Furthermore, objective scales or validated measurement tools for sleep depriva-tion, fasting, stress, and excessive physical activity were not used. Further studies with larger, more homogeneous groups and objective assessment methods are needed to validate these findings.

Keywords: Epilepsy, fasting, frailty model, physical activity, stress