Ontogenesis of chronic epileptic psychoses: a reanalysis

Abstract

SYNOPSIS As part of a study of various aspects of differential development between the sexes, the series of patients with epileptic psychoses published by Slater, Beard, and Glithero (1963) was reanalysed in the light of a hypothesis of differential cerebral maturation. As predicted by the hypothesis, females had an earlier onset of epilepsy and of psychosis than males. Whereas the sex ratio in epilepsy normally shows an excess of males, the sex ratio in epileptic psychoses is almost equal. Unlike most chronic temporal lobe epilepsies, the epilepsies which were later associated with psychosis arose largely within a specific developmental epoch around the pubertal growth spurt. Some of the clinical and biological implications of this finding are discussed.