Assessment of Association between Drugs Resistant Epilepsy (DRE) Among Patients with Obesity and Metabolic Disorders: An Exploratory Study

Objective: To assess the frequency and the association between the drugs resistant epilepsy (DRE) and obesity among patients at a tertiary care hospital in PakistanMethods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at the Department of Neurology, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Hyderabad for 6 months post-approval of the project starting from March 2023, to September 2023. Data was obtained from 116 epilepsy patients after calculating the sample size, patients aged 18-60 years old patients of both genders were included, Pregnant women, children under the age of 18 years, and patients with a diagnosis of chronic liver disease and psychological disorders were excluded from the study. All the data was transferred to MS Excel and later on, assessed using the SPSS version 20.Results: The data showed out of 116 patients the majority of patients with drug-resistant epilepsy were male i.e., 13.8%, however, 6.9% of females were seen with DRE cases the value of P was seen as 0.121. The BMI ranges were divided into 2 groups 19-30 and > 30. The more numbers of patients were among 12.1 % however the value of P =0.467. The mean ± standard deviation of age was 28.79±10.70 years. In the distribution of gender, 61 (52.6%) were male while 55 (47.4%) were female. Drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) was observed in 24 (20.7%) patients of the study cohort. The remaining 92 (79.3%) of patients did not exhibit DRE. The median of ages was analyzed by applying statistics and seen 23.00 the 10.7 of std. deviation (p=0.225)Conclusion: Drug-resistant epilepsy (DRE) was identified in 20.7% of patients, with no statistically significant association observed with gender, age, or BMI. Further studies with larger cohorts are recommended to explore obesity’s potential role in DRE prevalence and progression.