ABSTRACT
There are numerous measures of mortality. Cause specific mortality deals with the increased risk of someone with a particular disease dying as compared with some one without it. In the case of epilepsy, people with acute symptomatic seizures par ticularly those with status epilepticus have the highest mortality rates. Patients with remote symptomatic seizures make the next biggest contribution to mortality. Cere bral palsy and mental retardation would possibly be important coexisting factors in developing countries. In the case of progressive diseases, such as brain tumor obvi ously mortality will be high. Those with idiopathic epilepsy probably have the low est mortality rates. In the symptomatic group, death is usually related to the underlying condition rather than epilepsy per se. Even in the case of status epilepticus mortality is highly related to the underlying cause of SE. The risk of death in SE associated with anoxic/hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy following cardiac arrest is very high.
