Healthcare

A new study adding more highlight for the relationship between epilepsy and the risk of brain tumor.
Although previous studies has suggested that there is a link between epilepsy to brain tumor in later life, however, current study giving more strengthen for the relationship because involved large population in UK and long period.

According to the findings that archived in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, epilepsy patients for long period may associated with developing of brain tumor.

However, the authors point out that the risk is not absolute as brain tumor is a very uncommon, and the absolute risk for long period in this study about 1% to 2%.
In the study also, the authors found that epileptic seizure patients for the first time were almost 20 times more likely to develop a brain tumor than a comparison group admitted for relatively minor disorders.

The researchers explained that epilepsy has been predicted for long to the presentation of cerebral tumor, and therefore, they looked the data set for subsequent hospital admission or day case care for primary cerebral tumor including death from brain tumor among people with epilepsy from the data of the Oxford Record Linkage Study (ORLS, 1963 to 1998) and English national cohort from 1999 to 2005, a period during which neuroimaging for new-onset seizures has been routine,

Overall, regarding to the brain tumor development found in this study, the authors hypothesized that the seizure activity in some patients may be due to the preclinical phase of tumor development, or directly by tumor activity itself.
However, the authors suggested that this findings should be keep as reference for clinicians and not to ‘expose radically’ to their epilepsy patients, while the rate of incidences also minor and keep monitoring for the progress of epilepsy patients.