Is depression in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy related to hippocampal sclerosis? A meta-analysis.

Objective: To systematically evaluate the association between hippocampal sclerosis (HS) and depression in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) through a meta-analysis.

Methods: Chinese and English databases, such as the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Chinese Scientific Journals (VIP), WanFang, the Chinese Biomedical Literature Service System (SinoMed), PubMed and the Web of Science, were searched.

Results: Two evaluators independently screened the literature, extracted data and evaluated the risk of bias in the included studies in accordance with the inclusion and exclusion criteria. RevMan 5.1 was used to analyze the data. A total of 786 patients with epilepsy were included in the study, including 82 depressive patients with HS and 64 depressive patients without HS. The results showed that the TLE patients with HS were more likely to develop depression than those without HS (odds ratio (OR)= 2.14, 95% confidence interval (CI) [1.45, 3.16], Z = 3.85, p = 0.0001).

Conclusion: HS can be considered a high-risk factor for depression in patients with TLE, and the correlation is significant. However, the sample size included in the study was small; additional high-quality studies are needed in the future.