These effects may include social isolation, stigmatization, or disability. They may result in lower educational achievement and worse employment outcomes. Learning disabilities are common in those with the condition, and especially among children with epilepsy. The stigma of epilepsy can also affect the families of those with the disorder.Certain disorders occur more often in people with epilepsy, depending partly on the epilepsy syndrome present. These include depression, anxiety, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), and migraine. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects three to five times more children with epilepsy than children without the condition. ADHD and epilepsy have significant consequences on a childs behavioral, learning, and social development. Epilepsy is also more common in children with autism.Approximately, one-in-three people with epilepsy have a lifetime history of a psychiatric disorder. There are believed to be multiple causes for this including pathophysiological changes related to the epilepsy itself as well as adverse experiences related to living with epilepsy (e.g., stigma, discrimination). In addition, it is thought that the relationship between epilepsy and psychiatric disorders is not unilateral but rather bidirectional. For example, patients with depression have an increased risk for developing new-onset epilepsy.The presence of comorbid depression or anxiety in patients with epilepsy is associated with a poorer quality of life, increased mortality, increased healthcare utilization and a worse response to treatment (including surgical). Anxiety disorders and depression may explain more variability in quality of life than seizure type or frequency. There is evidence that both depression and anxiety disorders are underdiagnosed and undertreated in patients with epilepsy.
Less serious examples are benign rolandic epilepsy (2.8 per 100,000), childhood absence epilepsy (0.8 per 100,000) and juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (0.7 per 100,000). Severe syndromes with diffuse brain dysfunction caused, at least partly, by some aspect of epilepsy, are also referred to as developmental and epileptic encephalopathies. These are associated with frequent seizures that are resistant to treatment and cognitive dysfunction, for instance Lennox–Gastaut syndrome (1-2% of all persons with epilepsy), Dravet syndrome(1: 15000-40000 worldwide), and West syndrome(1-9: 100000). Genetics is believed to play an important role in epilepsies by a number of mechanisms. Simple and complex modes of inheritance have been identified for some of them. However, extensive screening have failed to identify many single gene variants of large effect. More recent exome and genome sequencing studies have begun to reveal a number of de novo gene mutations that are responsible for some epileptic encephalopathies, including CHD2 and SYNGAP1 and DNM1, GABBR2, FASN and RYR3.Syndromes in which causes are not clearly identified are difficult to match with categories of the current classification of epilepsy. Categorization for these cases was made somewhat arbitrarily. The idiopathic (unknown cause) category of the 2011 classification includes syndromes in which the general clinical features and/or age specificity strongly point to a presumed genetic cause. Some childhood epilepsy syndromes are included in the unknown cause category in which the cause is presumed genetic, for instance benign rolandic epilepsy. Others are included in symptomatic despite a presumed genetic cause (in at least in some cases), for instance Lennox-Gastaut syndrome.