Does academic achievement in children with epilepsy change over time?

A 4-year follow-up study of academic achievement in children aged between 1 1 and 17 years with epilepsy or asthma was carried out to identify differen ces between the two samples and to identify change in achievement over time . Differences based on sex and seizure severity also were explored. There w ere 98 subjects in the group with epilepsy and 96 subjects in the group wit h asthma. Academic achievement in five areas (Composite, Reading, Mathemati cs, Language, and Vocabulary) was measured using school-administered group test scores. To explore change over time in condition severity, each child was categorized as having a low or high condition severity at baseline (tim e I) and again 4 years later, resulting in four groups: low-low, low-high, high-low, and high-high. There were too few cases in the low-high group to be included in the analyses. Data were processed using analysis of covarian ce (ANCOVA), intraclass correlation coefficients, and paired t tests. At fo llow-up the children with epilepsy continued to perform significantly worse in all five achievement areas than the children with asthma, Children with either inactive or low-severity epilepsy had mean scores comparable to nat ional norms; those with high seizure severity had mean scores ranging from 3 to 5 points below national norms. No changes were found in academic achie vement over time for either sample, even among those whose conditions impro ved. Although boys with high-severity epilepsy continued to have the lowest achievement scores, there was no trend for them to decline in achievement over time.