Prevalence of epilepsy in the People's Republic of China: a systematic review

Abstract

To date there has not been a nationwide systematic analysis of the prevalence of epilepsy in China. The aim of this study was to estimate the prevalence of epilepsy in mainland China from the published studies and analyze the prevalence of epilepsy by survey method, gender, location, age, seizure type and prevalence of date. We searched the PubMed, Embase, Chinese Biological Medical Literature (CBM), Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Wanfang and Chongqing VIP databases for epidemiological studies on the prevalence of epilepsy. Thirty-eight studies were included that comprised a total sample size of 7,695,961, among whom 13,224 had epilepsy. The overall prevalence of epilepsy was 2.89‰. The prevalence of males and females were 3.83‰ and 3.45‰, respectively. The location-specific prevalence in urban and rural areas was 2.34‰ and 3.17‰, respectively. Prevalence by age groups, 0-9, 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, 50-59, 60-69 and ≥70 were 2.21‰, 3.23‰, 3.14‰, 2.83‰, 2.96‰, 2.61‰, 2.76‰ and 2.22‰, respectively. In the subgroup analysis by prevalence date, prevalence rate of epilepsy ranged from 1.19‰ to 6.70‰. As for the seizure types, the overall prevalence of generalized seizures, partial seizures and unclassifiable seizures were 3.12‰, 0.57‰ and 0.23‰, respectively. Overall, the prevalence rate of epilepsy is different for each area in mainland China. A higher prevalence of epilepsy is found in the subgroup analysis by male, rural, age group of 10-19 and generalized seizures. However, more epidemiological studies are needed from other provinces to estimate the overall prevalence of epilepsy in mainland China.