High prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities in children and adolescents at a tertiary epilepsy center.

Background: Epilepsy is highly comorbid with psychiatric disorders and a significant amount of the morbidity related to epilepsy is in fact a result of psychiatric comorbidities.

Objective: To investigate the frequency of different psychiatric comorbidities in children with refractory epilepsy.

Methods: We present preliminary observational data from a series of patients (n=82) examined in the psychiatric branch of a tertiary epilepsy center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.