Who Develops a Brain Tumor After an Epilepsy Diagnosis?

A large retrospective study didn't quite answer that important clinical question, but it confirmed that an epilepsy diagnosis is associated with about a 20-fold increased risk for a newly identified brain tumor.

Patients with a new diagnosis of epilepsy have a greater long-term risk for newly identified brain tumors than the general population. Nevertheless, the absolute number of epilepsy patients who develop brain tumors is low, and clinicians have little guidance as to how to identify the patients at risk.

To attempt to provide some guidance, researchers conducted a retrospective cohort study of hospital diagnostic-code data and death records from two U.K. datasets: one covering 1963 through 1998 and another covering 1999 through 2005. The risk for a newly diagnosed brain tumor among more than 112,000 patients discharged with an epilepsy diagnosis was compared with brain-tumor risk in a comparison cohort of nearly 5 million people discharged with…

Reviewing Author

W. Allen Hauser, MD