Epilepsy is a neurological disorder in which activities in the brain causes is interrupted leading to seizures. At the time of seizures, a person experiences various symptoms like loss of consciousness.
In this study it was found that people who had temporal lobe epilepsy had problem in thinking and are persistent with depressed moods. In the epilepsy research, it was found that people who had epilepsy and also lived in the disadvantaged neighborhood which includes higher poverty, improper services, etc. had more severe symptoms of low memory, thinking, and mental health.
These findings were assessed when a total of 800 participants of an average age of 38 years who had epilepsy were selected. Participants were assessed on memory, thinking skills, depression, and anxiety. Along with this their address was taken and their area deprivation index was calculated to determine if they lived in advantaged or disadvantaged backgrounds. This index determined the socio-economic conditions of each’s participant’s neighborhood based on 17 factors namely education, housing conditions, income, employment, etc.
After this the participants were divided in 5 groups based on neighbor advantage. It was found that people living in advantaged neighborhoods had higher attention span as compared to people living in disadvantaged background. Similar results were found in other aspects like intelligence, memory, processing speed, etc.
With this research we can state few reasons of why neighborhoods affect people with epilepsy:
Access to healthcare: In the disadvantaged neighborhood there are lack of medical facilities, proper hospitals, etc. which can cause difficulty for the people with epilepsy as they require proper medical surveillance throughout.
Safety: In epilepsy, seizures can occur suddenly and can cause injury in disadvantaged neighborhoods. People require proper walking space, lighting, cleanliness, etc.
Therefore it is important for the people with epilepsy to stay in the neighborhood with appropriate safety.
Social Support: People with epilepsy are subjected to lot of discrimination, stigmatization due to their illness. It is important are people in their neighborhood are educated about it and they provide an appropriate social support to them. Social support makes it easier for a person to cope with their disease and also reduces their stress and depression.
Environmental triggers: Many environmental factors like pollution, housing conditions, hygenic factors can cause seizure to happen so it important that the neighborhood of the people with epilepsy should be appropriate including all the hygenic factors so that people are not triggered.
Quality of life: Living in a neighborhood with a high poverty rate, and crime rate can cause stress and anxiety to people with epilepsy making their condition worsen so it important that the neighborhood they live in should have hight quality of life so that their condition do not detoriate.
Hence, we can conclude that there is a linkage between epilepsy and the neighborhood condition a person lives in. The neighborhood also influences the thinking and memory of the people with epilepsy.
