Seizure disorders have been identified in patients suffering from different types of dementia. However, the risks associated with the subtypes of those seizures have not been characterized.

To compare the occurrence of seizure disorders (partial and generalized) between patients with and without a dementia diagnosis from the OPTUM database.

All ages, and patients with full eligibility between January of 2005 to December of 2014, were included. Data from OPTUM, a de-identified, HIPAA compliant database, made up of 40.7 million private insured patient individual electronic health records from the US, were utilized. Using ICD-9 diagnoses, the occurrence of generalized or partial seizure disorders was identified. A comparison between patients with and without dementia was performed.

A total of 150,516 patient records had a dementia diagnosis, and, 56.38% of them were females. Patients with dementia when compared to those without dementia had higher risk for seizure disorders [odds ratio (OR) = 6.5 95% CI = 4.4–9.5]; grand mal status (OR = 6.5, 95% CI = 5.7–7.3); partial seizures (OR = 6.0, 95% CI = 5.5–6.6); motor simple partial status (OR = 5.6, 95% CI = 3.5–9.0); epilepsy (OR = 5.0, 95% CI = 4.8–5.2); complex partial epileptic seizures (OR = 4.9, 95% CI = 4.6–5.2); generalized convulsive epilepsy (OR = 4.8, 95% CI = 4.5–5.0); localization-related epilepsy (OR = 4.5, 95% CI = 4.1–4.9); petit mal status (OR = 4.2, 95% CI = 2.9–6.1); fits convulsions (OR = 3.5, 95% CI = 3.4–3.6); and complex febrile seizure (OR = 2.5, 95% CI = 1.6–3.9).

The present study confirms that patients with dementia have higher risks for either generalized or partial seizures disorders when compared with patients without dementia.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.