ABSTRACT
Samden D. Lhatoo and Josemir W. Sander Prognosis in epilepsy is defined as the prospect of attaining complete freedom
from seizures once a pattern of recurrent epileptic seizures has been established. Between 70 and 80% of people developing epilepsy will remit, while the remainder continue to have seizures despite optimum treatment. Remission usually occurs in the first five years. Thus for the majority of people, epilepsy is a short-lived condi tion.1 The vast majority of studies on prognosis are from the developed world and there are few studies from the developing world. This highlights a real need for comprehensive studies to address this hiatus in our knowledge of the epilepsies in the developing world where the distribution of etiologies in particular and health care infrastructures in general vary in many ways.
