Relative Frequency of Different Types of Epilepsy: A Study Employing the Classification of the International League Against Epilepsy

Approximately three-quarters of epileptic patients seen in consultation by specialists can easily be assigned to one of the diagnostic categories of the International League against Epilepsy. When patient age is taken into account, such a distribution shows that partial epilepsy is more common than generalized epilepsy (62% versus 38%) in patients of all ages, especially in those over 15 years of age (78% versus 22%). In contrast, generalized epilepsy is more frequent in subjects under 15 than partial epilepsy (55% versus 45%). In this younger age group the rarity of partial epilepsy is primarily due to the infrequency of temporal lobe epilepsy (21% of cases, as opposed to 56% in subjects over 15), whereas both primary and secondary generalized epilepsy contribute to the frequency of generalized epilepsy in this group.